The presence of plastic waste in bird nests, often mistaken for natural materials such as twigs or leaves, has been established for several years. However, the sometimes fatal entanglements caused by these plastics in chicks had, until now, been poorly documented.
According to Ursula Heinze, an ecologist at the University of East Anglia, this is because “Nests are often checked late, when the young birds have already fledged. But when chicks die shortly after hatching, parents push their corpses out of the nest quite fast, so their deaths go unnoticed.” Heinze participated in a European study conducted in Portugal that aimed to address this bias by monitoring nests weekly for an entire year. The results, published in mid-July in Ecological Indicators, revealed that nearly all of the 568 white stork nests studied contained plastic, and that more than one in 10 chicks were found entangled in the debris; cases of entanglement were observed in more than a quarter of the nests.
Most entanglements proved fatal, often due to infected wounds, strangulation, or necrotic limbs, usually less than two weeks after hatching. “Some [were] only a few days [old],” reported Heinze. “Whenever possible, we freed the chicks and disinfected their wounds, but very few survived,” she said. “Their legs were often necrotic or had fallen off. Some were even eaten alive by maggots.”
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