Every now
and then, a wildlife photo can pull on your heartstrings and stir up angry
feelings at the same time by exposing the oftentimes harsh juxtaposition of the
natural world against our human-made one.
In 2017,
there was the seahorse riding a Q-tip. This year, there is a mother bird
feeding her chick a cigarette butt. It's very sobering.
Captured on
camera by Karen Mason, a volunteer bird steward, the photo shows a black
skimmer bird - cigarette butt in beak - delivering the litter to her white and
brown speckled chick as a dinnertime snack.
Mason told
CBS News she was “very angry” when she realized what exactly it was the mother
bird was carrying and so, posted the images on various conservation sites and
Facebook to raise awareness around the issue of littering.
Apparently,
trash in St Pete Beach in Tampa, Florida (where the photo was taken), is
"pretty common". "People don't seem to realize how harmful they
are," she said.
"If you
smoke, please don't leave your butts behind," Mason wrote in one caption.
"This
Skimmer chick was offered a cigarette butt by its parent. It’s time we cleaned
up our beaches and stopped treating them like one giant ashtray.
#nobuttsforbabies," she wrote in another, posted a few days later.
Like straws,
plastic bags, and coffee cups, cigarette butts are a source of plastic
pollution. They are often made up of plastic fibers called cellulose acetate
that can take anywhere between 18 months and 10 years to decompose. They are
also the number one trash item found on beaches globally, Ocean Conservancy
found in a report published last year.
"Many
birds are curious about the things we casually discard, and will often
investigate to try and find out if something is food or not," said a
spokesperson for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) in an
interview with the BBC.
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