At 88, Betty White (right) killed on Saturday Night Live last weekend, and she has the ratings to prove it.

The TV legend scored the show’s highest viewership since November 2008, when Ben Affleck’s hosting gig featured guest appearances by Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain and Tina Fey as Sarah Palin. (For the record: Palin’s “Drill, Baby, Drill” idiocy should force her to de-oil a few hundred bird victims of the massive British Petroleum oil spill that remains uncontained.)

White has served as a Morris Animal Foundation trustee for more than 40 years, and she has promised to match $25,000 in contributions to help wildlife scientists determine animals’ needs created by the oil spill. (Click here to donate.)

“The need is so great right now,” White says. “There are some species that may not make it through this. Morris Animal Foundation’s rapid-response fund was set up just for these types of needs.”

“When starting this fund two months ago, we had no idea we would need to use it so quickly,” says veterinarian Wayne A. Jensen, the foundation’s chief scientific officer.

“Although tragic, events such as these provide research opportunities to develop better methods to diagnose disease and treat affected animals. Through this fund, we hope to provide researchers with much-needed funds to act quickly to address wildlife health needs in times of crisis.”

If you enjoyed White’s performance as much as I did, please donate to her worthy cause.

For Your Organic Bookshelf: Night Fire: Big Oil, Poison Air, and Margie Richard’s Fight to Save Her Town

Photo: NBC

Birds—from ducks and herons to terns and the brown pelican (Louisiana’s state bird)—are becoming the latest victims of the British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf Coast. 

“It’s a full moon, a high tide, and it’s bringing the oil on a free ride right into the coastal salt marshes on a southerly wind,” says Dr. Ken Rosenberg, director of conservation science at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “It is also peak migration season for birds crossing the gulf; tens of thousands of exhausted shorebirds are going to be arriving in the next two weeks. They’re flying over water and stopping to refuel on the beaches and in the estuaries along the Gulf Coast, directly in the path of this massive spill.” 

As with other environmentalists, Dr. Rosenberg blames “our thirst for fossil fuel” for this unprecedented manmade disaster. 

“We’ve been playing Russian roulette with our environment, and the gun just went off,” he says. 

Precursor to Human Harm 

“Birds are an important first indicator of environmental health, and the old analogy of the canary in the coal mine is really relevant here,” Dr. Rosenberg says. “A lot of these birds are going to die, but that’s just the beginning of the story of what might happen to the coastal environment for both wildlife and people if the oil doesn’t stop flowing.” 

At first, breeding bird colonies along the coast will be devastated. Next, thousands of brown pelicans—removed from the endangered species list only last year—will be affected, along with other water-bird colonies. Dependent on fish and other marine life for food and survival, bird populations will die as oil comes ashore. Gulf Coast ecosystems are already extremely fragile because of Hurricane Katrina and other storms. 

De-Oiling Birds 

The International Fund for Animal Welfare estimates millions of birds are at risk. 

“When a bird’s feathers become clogged with oil, they no longer act as a waterproof coat,” says Dr. Ian Robinson, IFAW’s emergency relief director. “Cold water penetrates to the bird’s skin and rapidly leads to hypothermia. 

“At the same time, as the bird preens to try and clean the oil from the feathers, it inadvertently ingests toxic oil, which leads to symptoms of poisoning, including diarrhea and dehydration.” 

“There will be a lot of people mobilized to try to save individual birds by bringing them into rehab and de-oiling them,” Dr. Rosenberg adds, “and there will be some success in saving individual birds. But whether that can save the breeding populations in these areas—we don’t know. If the oil then comes into the coastal marshes and the inshore ecosystems and kills the oyster beds and the shrimp and the fish nurseries, then there are much longer-lasting effects not only on birds, but on an entire way of life for people of this region.” 

For Your Organic Bookshelf: Shattered Lives: Anatomy of an Oil Spill

A new report from the Wildlife Conservation Society reveals that more than a dozen animals are facing new risks related to global warming, including:

• Changing land and sea temperatures
• Shifting rain patterns
• Exposure to new pathogens and disease
• Increased threats from predators
• Deforestation

“The image of a forlorn-looking polar bear on a tiny ice floe has become the public’s image of climate change in nature, but the impact reaches species in nearly every habitat in the world’s wild places,” says President and CEO Steven E. Sanderson, PhD. “In fact, our own researchers are observing direct impacts on a wide range of species across the world.”

The affected wildlife includes:

• Flamingos. Climate change reduces the availability and quality of wetland habitats in the Caribbean, South America, Asia and Africa.
• Irrawaddy dolphins. This coastal species relies on the flow of fresh water from estuaries in Bangladesh and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Changes in flow and salinity may have an impact on the species’ long-term survival.
• Hawksbill turtles. Higher temperatures result in more female hatchlings, which could impact the species’ long-term survival by skewing sex ratios.

“Aside from all of the current political disagreements on meteorological data, we can say with certainty that climate change is threatening our planet with significant losses to wildlife and wild places,” Dr. Sanderson says.

For Your Organic Bookshelf: Saving Wildlife: A Century of Conservation

Despite not being used for decades, DDT byproducts still exist in the environment, especially in marine animals like fish, and now a new study in the journal Occupational and Environmental Medicine links DDE, a breakdown of DDT, with obesity in young women.

The research, involving the offspring of 259 pregnant women living along and eating fish from Lake Michigan, discovered the group with intermediate levels of DDE gained an average of 13 pounds of excess weight and the group with the highest exposure of DDE gained more than 20 extra pounds.

Study participants were taken from a larger research sample first recruited in the 1970s with scientists approaching the daughters of these women in 2000. Experts also examined the correlation between PCBs, a chemical used in flame retardants and hydraulic fluids, and obesity, but no link was found.

Via ScienceDaily.