Squeaky stuffed animals are endearing. But when the animal is a real baby bird and its stomach makes crunching noises from all the plastic it has ingested, the endearment quickly turns into a dystopian nightmare.
This, however, is not happening in a faraway dystopia. Scientists from the Adrift Lab ocean research group were horrified to discover “crunchy birds” on Australia’s UNESCO World Heritage-listed Lord Howe Island. What’s more, on their first day of fieldwork on the island this year, the researchers found a dead baby bird that had ingested 778 pieces of plastic, breaking the lab’s 15-year record for the greatest amount of plastic ingested by a single bird—and by a long shot.
“This year we decided we’re no longer going to say to each other ‘it can’t possibly get worse’ because each year it just does,” the researchers wrote in an Adrift Lab news release. “Terms like ‘unprecedented’ and ‘horrific’ really don’t do it justice. As scientists on the front lines of the environment/pollution/biodiversity crises, we can barely begin to describe what witnessing this for two decades has done to our mental and physical well being.”
The team visits the island every year to monitor the impact of plastic pollution on shearwaters—dark-colored, long-winged migratory seabirds, as reported by CNN. Though the cases and quantities of ingested plastic have been rising, this year’s fieldwork “left us all speechless,” Adrift Lab marine biologist Jennifer Lavers, who was on the island, told CNN. Lavers and her colleagues think parent birds are mistaking plastic for food, and feeding it to their chicks.
A total of 778 plastic pieces in the bird, which died when it was between 80 and 90 days old, suggests its parents fed it approximately 10 pieces of plastic litter per day. The previous record was around 400 pieces, according to the lab’s statement.
“This bird, and so many others in recent years, now contain such enormous quantities of plastic that when our research team gently presses on their stomachs, we hear awful crunching noises as the plastics shift around inside,” the researchers wrote. “We literally call them ‘crunchy birds’ because…what other name could we give them.” Alex Bond, an ecologist at Adrift Lab, tells the Washington Post that they can even hear it in some live birds.
And it’s not just microplastics, which scientists have already found everywhere from chewing gum to human testicles and brains. Bond reported finding objects as large as bottle caps and takeaway soy sauce fish bottles, as well as cutlery, clothes pegs, and countless amounts of unidentified hunks of plastic.
The ingested plastic is, unsurprisingly, harming the birds. During dissections, the team found scarring on the birds’ kidneys and hearts, as well as ‘dementia-like’ brain damage in baby shearwaters, according to CNN. “They don’t kill the animal instantly, but they do cause it to have a shorter life span (and) lots of pain and suffering,” Lavers told CNN. Furthermore, she and her colleagues have noted a consistent decrease in the birds’ body mass and wingspan over the years.
This spring, Australian Senator Peter Whish-Wilson traveled to Lord Howe Island along with the researchers. “I wish every politician and every decision maker in parliaments around the world, because this is a global problem, I wish they could all experience what I experienced just for 24 hours, to come down here and do it themselves, and then they’ll get it,” he told ABC Australia. “We are not winning the war on waste.”
Scientists often treat seabirds as marine ecosystem health indicators, looking to them to understand how our oceans are doing. These sentinels are sending us a stark warning.
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