“Many visitors to the archipelago have been wondering where ducks have gone the last few decades. Now, a group of Swedish researchers have found that there is an extensive bird birth death due to the lack of B vitamin thiamine. Thiamine is necessary both for a number of vital enzymes at the cellular level to absorb nutrients and for the nerves to function.

Birds of many species are dying in large numbers in the Baltic region. They lose flight ability, appetite, and even their voices. Anyone approaching a herring gull colony was normally met by a deafening shouts and powerful attacks – now the affected colonies just cackle weakly. After about ten days they die. Virtually all birds that received a tiamininjektion recovered.

Scientists have seen tiaminshortage in about thirty different species, but specially studied the herring gull, eider ducks and starlings. Herring Gull with low tiaminlevel put fewer eggs and many colonies have disappeared. In Värmland population is more stable while the herring gull will soon be disappeared from Södermanland archipelago in Sweden. Eider lays eggs now that either do not hatch or eider ckikens die very early. In recent years, for a few days old ducklings, there have been only a kid in a hundred eider females ! Too few kids while even the adult birds die, means that the eider population decreases sharply.”

We, the BSRRW, suggest to take into the whole scope of the environmental analyses of the birds life the fact, that the Baltic Sea is the most radioactive sea in the world and how the high amounts of radionuclides in the Baltic Sea region could have contributed to the hazardous conditions for the eider and other birds as well as the organisms they consume.  

BSR nuclear contamination Maps fr scientific papers:

http://www.bsrrw.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/BS-radioactive-.pdf 

http://www.bsrrw.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Latvija-Cernobilas-rad-karte-bsr-.pdf