EDITOR'S NOTE: Charlestown's Town Council Boss Tom Gentz famously hates Canada Geese to the point of creeping up on their nests and shaking their eggs to make sure they don't produce new gooslings. So this article should give him some satisfaction.
Bottle caps, coffee
cup lids, packing tape wire, foil, Styrofoam pellets—sounds like the
ingredients for a MacGyver prison camp break out, right?
Not quite—this is what
Canadian researchers are finding in the stomachs of freshwater birds across the
country, including birds like long-tailed ducks and loons, which prefer more
remote, wild areas.
The new research
suggests Canada’s freshwater birds, just like their ocean-dwelling
counterparts, are at risk from our plastic-saturated lifestyles.
“We think of urban mallards or gulls around cities picking up contamination, but you think of long-tailed ducks or something … a person into wildlife would associate them with wild places,” said Mark Mallory, a professor and Canada research chair in coastal wetland ecosystems at Acadia University. “It’s kind of shocking really.”
A routine dissection
two years ago by a graduate student in Mallory’s lab found mallards and black
ducks had plastics and metals in their gizzards, the hind part of a bird’s
stomach. Mallory had been studying plastic pollution in Arctic Ocean birds.
“Finding that in freshwater birds surprised us quite a bit,” he said.
Working with another
graduate student, Erika Holland, Mallory teamed with hunters and various
organizations to collect 350 freshwater birds—18 species of ducks, geese,
loons— across Canada.
They found plastics in 10 of the 18 species and 11
percent of the birds’ total. The results were published last month in the journal Science of the
Total Environment.
While much research
has looked at plastic pollution in ocean birds, little was known previously
about Canada’s inland waterfowl.
“I’m surprised and not
surprised," said Doug Tozer, an Ontario program scientist at the Bird
Studies Canada organization who was not involved in the study. "You don’t
really have to even read the literature, just go down to the beach and this plastic
stuff is everywhere.”
Triggering stomach sensors and toxics
Such pollution can
hurt birds in three main ways: first it can block up their system if the
plastic can’t pass into the intestine, said Jennifer Provencher, who is
finishing her Ph.D. at Carleton University studying the diet and pollution in
Arctic birds.
“One of the biggest
problems is it causes them to feel full so they stop eating,” said Provencher,
who was not involved in the current study. “It’s like the feeling after
Thanksgiving—imagine a bird ingesting a whole bunch of plastic, then the
sensors in the stomach signal to the brain ‘not hungry’, so they don’t eat.”
Also the garbage can
puncture the bird’s stomach.
“In a freshwater gull
we once saw wires, like the gauge of coat hanger, sticking right out through
the gizzard,” Mallory said. “There was an infection and sores where it
perforated out.”
The third risk to
birds is pollutants that are on the plastic. Some plastic already has harmful
chemicals built right in, and then it can pick up more chemicals from the
water. “Birds ingest the plastic, it sits inside their oily stomach contents,
contaminants are desorbed off the plastics and taken up by birds,” Provencher
said.
Mallory said he’s
pretty much seen it all inside the birds.
“Almost anything you
can think of, things like bottle caps, bits of plastic containers like a
margarine container, coffee cup lids, various Styrofoam like the kinds from
disposal coolers … then some gross stuff like Band Aids.
“Once we found an
entire hamburger wrapper,” he said.
From sea to inland lakes
It’s unclear what
impact such pollution is having on Canada’s freshwater bird populations. Tozer
said that the latest bird population report from Bird Studies Canada showed
that waterfowl populations are doing well and climbing steadily since the
1970s.
“But we still have to
add this to the list of factors these birds have to face,” he said.
Researchers have been
reporting plastic pollution in the ocean and freshwater lakes for years and
increasingly find it in wildlife.
In oceans, for
example, scientists estimate that 90 percent of seabirds now eat plastic trash.
“This threat is geographically widespread, pervasive, and rapidly increasing,”
wrote the researchers who made the estimate in a study published last year in Proceedings
of the National Academy of Science.
There is less research
on freshwater birds. A study last year reported that about 11 percent of 140
mallards, black ducks and common eider tested in Canada had plastic in them.
However, it wasn’t clear whether the birds were contaminated during time they
spent near oceans or freshwater.
Because of the size,
vastness and currents of oceans, researchers usually can’t tell where the
plastic pollution came from, Provencher said. “But freshwater offers a lot more
evidence of local sources, local pollution.”
She said that while
plastic is pervasive and not likely to go away anytime soon, that doesn’t mean
this is a lost cause. In fact, a lesson most of us learned in kindergarten
could help out our feathered friends.
“It may sound corny
but the old reduce, reuse, recycle model is still the best one to follow,” she
said. “We need to think about what things do we actually need to have plastic
and how can we prevent more things from going into the landfill.”
For questions or
feedback about this piece, contact Brian Bienkowski at bbienkowski@ehn.org.