Let's clean up our local environment so we can continue to talk about birds.

As we head towards the spring season, I wanted to take a moment to go off the rails, in a good way. We’ve got to talk trash. Each year, the amount of litter on our roadsides continues to increase. Unless it’s cleaned up, there’s a pretty decent chance that the debris is going to make it’s way into a nearby storm drain and ultimately, enter our waterways. This is a serious threat to our local environment and the habitats involved.

This morning I headed to the beach with my family to conduct a beach cleanup. We found discarded beer bottles and liquor nips, diapers, fishing line, tons of plastic wrappers, cups, straws, takeout containers, and so on.

Most alarming? The tiny pieces of plastic that are so broken down, you can’t tell what they are. My mom and I sifted through the smallest section of salt marsh reeds and there were endless plastic pieces. Even if we worked the same section for eight hours, we wouldn’t have finished cleaning up the area.

What does trash have to do with birds?

Plastic pollution is extremely harmful to birds. While I have faith that animals and birds are smart enough to avoid chipping away at a plastic cup, I have zero faith that they are able to avoid the microplastics that the cup turns into when they are foraging for seaweed or other fish. Plastic ingestion can not only lead to death among our birds, it eventually ends up in our food system. The same way a duck might ingest a tiny piece of plastic when eating, the fish we eat are just as vulnerable to plastic pollution. It’s a viscous cycle.

A Great Blue Heron takes a rest. Circled in red are tiny pieces of plastic. Imagine the pieces that are not visible to the naked eye.

My plea to you.

I urge you to gather your friends and family and head to a local roadway, park, beach, neighborhood, really any place, and host a litter cleanup. Not only will you make the selected area visually appealing, you will be helping to reduce the impact that plastic pollution has on local habitats. We owe it to our environment to get out there and do something.