A portion of the spill appears to be headed for Orca Inlet in the southeast corner of the Sound, Timm said. That area and the nearby Copper River Delta contain some of the most important fish and wildlife habitat in Alaska. More than 10 million shorebirds will begin arriving on the Delta within a week. Timm said a call had gone out to Cordova fishermen to round up cable, cable clamps and chainsaws in hopes that oldfashioned manpower can be used to build a boom of felled trees to keep oil out of the inlet and away from sensitive wetlands behind it. Birds and otters have proven themselves highly vulnerable to the oil that has drifted around the Sound the past week.
Otters are the only marine mammal lacking a protective layer of blubber beneath their hide.
They depend totally on their dense fur for warmth and floatation. When that fur gets dirty, the otter dies. These animals are so sensitive to contamination that early efforts to transplant them from Alaska to other parts of the West Coast failed. The otters, their fur dirtied by handling, died in captivity. It wasn't until biologists developed ways to keep the animals clean that transplants became possible.