Birds & Garbage: More Reasons to Stop Masking

Birds everywhere are swimming, nesting, and living in human garbage, most of it plastic. Crowd-sourced photos from all over the world in a project called Birds & Debris are documenting the mess.

To date, birds from every continent except Antarctica have been recorded tangled up in fishing lines, balloon debris, clothing bits, and especially, surgical masks. Nearly one-fourth of the photos show birds entangled in disposable face masks.

“It's almost all masks,” Alex Bond from the Natural History Museum in London told BBC News. "And if you think of the different materials a surgical mask is made from – there's the elastic that we see tangled around birds' legs or we might see birds injured by trying to ingest the fabric or the hard piece of plastic that secures it over your nose.”

Bond and colleagues have been running the online project, now in its fourth year, to raise awareness about the truly global problem. The blame for trash in the wild is on mostly everybody, from the manufacturers that churn out reams of plastic to careless individuals who toss used masks on the ground. International trade ensures that the trail of garbage is spread everywhere.

Altering individual behaviors can help but it won’t fix the problem. “Changing to a bamboo toothbrush or a canvas shopping bag is not going to save the world,” says Bond. “Most large-scale plastic production today is commercial and industrial."

The solution, if there is one, will require global cooperation, similar to what was achieved with the Montreal Protocol, which banned ozone-depleting chemicals – probably the most successful global agreement ever signed.

“We need the same thing with plastic pollution,” says Bond, “and we're moving in that direction, but just very, very slowly." 

Document your local avian atrocities at birdsanddebris.com.

Photo credit: Mary Caporal Prio