Killer in the nest: how young storks are being strangled by plastic | Birds

ONa end of spring morning in agricultural land in southern Portugal, Dr. Marta Acácio put his scale against a tree and started to climb. At four meters standing, she reached the giant nest of the white stork which was its goal. She knew that in telescopic camera photos, there was a healthy chick inside – and now she wanted to ring him.

But when Acácio, an environmentalist from the University of Montpellier in France, tried to pick up the chick, he would not leave: he was attached to the nest by a piece of plastic ball string. She returned the chick and fell back: her belly was a mass of maggots.

“He was eaten alive below,” explains Acácio.

With the pocket knife that she now carries to cope with this increasingly common situation, she cut the string, put the chick in a bag of carrier and is descended. She and her colleagues cleaned and disinfected the injury before bringing the chick back to the nest.

“I was hoping that the chick would survive,” she says. “But unfortunately, he did not recover injury.”

The nest was one of the 93 a team of environmentalists inspected each week during the reproduction season of 2023. Cigognes build gigantic nests over the decades, weighing up to 1,000 kg (2,200 lb). They balance not only on branches, but on structures such as telephone posts. Many other species of birds, including sparrows, starlings and crepussels, live in nests.

“The stork nest is in fact a colony of other species. It is a fantastic species, ”explains Professor Aldina Franco, an environmentalist at the University of East Anglia (UEA) and member of the research team.

Scientists followed an intuition they – and environmentalists around the world – lacked a hidden death toll of the plastic that the birds incorporated into their nests. Scientists tend to inspect nests only in leakage time, but dead chicks can be quickly thrown by parents, so that those killed by plastic at the start of their lives may not be counted.

More than four years, researchers from the EUA and the University of Lisbon have photographed nearly 600 white storks (Ciconia Ciconia) nests. Then, every week of the 2023 breeding season, Acácio and Ursula Heinze of UEA physically inspected a selection of nests.

The results, published in the Ecological indicators’ journal on Monday, are alarming. About 90% of the 600 nests photographed contained plastic. In these, scientists climbed, more than a quarter – 27% – contained tangled chicks. Most only had two weeks.

The chief of the chef was Baler Twine, a plastic chain used to secure the hay balls: the string or his packaging were responsible for almost all the tangled chicks. Some have been taken from domestic plastics such as bags or milk containers. The chicks have died of strangulation, amputation and infected injuries.

“They roll and roll and they go around and it is almost as if they tied the rope around their even stronger legs as they move,” explains Franco.

Acácio also likes to talk about successful rescues. Once, she looked in a nest built on the stump of a cork oak to find two three -week brothers and sisters, their members wrapped in blue ball spirals.

“I thought that the chicks were so seriously tangled that no longer survived,” explains Acácio, “unfortunately the little chick did not survive, but the largest, which always has the brands of the tangle, survived and in its own right.”

Birds on each continent use plastic and other human layoffs in their nests. The drawbacks of plastic debris are well known in the marine world, with graphic images of plastic turtles, sea birds and fish. But we know less about its effect on terrestrial birds.

“This is not a Portuguese problem or even a white stork problem,” said Dr. Inês Catry, avian environment at the University of Lisbon who led the project. “Balle string is widespread in many areas in many countries.”

The few other studies that have been carried out, in the Americas and in Europe, did not involve weekly visits and found lower tangle rates, from 0.3% to 5.6%. This study revealed a 12%nesting tangle rate.

In Montana in the United States, Marco Restani, the power biologist of the Power Company Northwestern Energy, worked with volunteers to monitor ospreys nesting 600 km from the Yellowstone river.

Restani says that although the plastic tangle is not yet a threat to the population for the Ospreys, the cases it finds are “horrible”.

“It’s a horrible way to die. And it’s horrible for people who also discover it. ”

In Argentina, Dr. María Soledad Liébana, Raptor biologist at the Pampa Earth and Environment Institute, studied plastic tangle among southern Caracaras babies, a type of raptor.

“The plastic tangle seems to be a serious and growing threat for a wide range of bird species, in many different regions of the world,” she said.

For birds already threatened by other factors, a tangle rate of 12% could “apply a lot of pressure,” said Dr. Neil James, an ecologist at the Scottish University of Highlands and Islands.

James founded a website in 2019, Birdsanddebris.com, to which anyone can point out tangles and human debris found in the nests. Until now, the nests of an “alarming” species in the world have contained human debris and two thirds are terrestrial, he said.

Baler Twine accumulates in the landscape at a great pace, say the Heinze team. The market was worth $ 300 million (220 million pounds sterling) worldwide in 2023 and 80,000 tonnes were used each year across Europe in 2019. The amount of leak in the environment is unknown.

While farmers play a crucial role in prevention of plastic leak in the environment – for example by ensuring that no plastic debris remains on the ground – many aspects of the plastic footprint are out of their control, for example if there are recycling installations nearby or if there are biodegradable alternatives.

The collection patterns are unequal across Europe, but research has revealed that where they are offered, they have succeeded. Scientists are looking for how to replace polypropylene string, and some biodegradable nets are already on the market.

In the meantime, for some of the white storks, there is a simple step that could help, explains Heinze: mower under their nests. This provides birds with practical abundance of natural nesting materials and reduces the amount of plastic they use.

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