Plastic (land) birds

We have a flock of Satin Bowerbirds who live around us. They're shy, clever birds. You should see them go for our strawberries in summer! They're attracted to foods in that colour spectrum. I guess before the arrival of whites they may have gone for such foods as the native blueberry or lilli pillis.

The male is glossy black and a bit larger than a pigeon. The female and juveniles are olive and brown. The male builds a bachelor pad - a bower - to lure chicks, er. I mean, female birds. If he can get her there, he shows her his collection of bright blue things (which is a bit like a Barry White vinyl record collection for us). He does a sexy dance for her, and then they are married in the bird way and have kids. I don't know whether they're monogamous, but there's only one bower on our property, and probably 30 birds, so..... hmmm, sounds like a bit of a player to me.

As a kid, I remember seeing a bower and it was all blue foil milk bottle tops (from the glass milk bottle days) and blue pegs. Now, it's all manner of plastic crap. However, I did recently see a passionflower down there, lying just at the edge. How wonderful an all natural bower must have looked! I don't believe Aboriginal people had any kind of blue dyes, mainly clay and ochres. So the birds would probably have used berries and flowers only.

I guess the girls would have been able to have a nice snack when they went to his pad too?

 

Then there's this magpie nest, which I posted on my Facebook page a few months ago. You might recognise some similar materials to those in the bower. That pale blue nylon rope?

Then there was the little wagtail's nest on the drive, lined with polyethylene terephthalate (polyester) cushion stuffing (which I suspect came from an old cushion I'd put in the dogs' kennels earlier that year).

These are just what I've found since I've started recording them in the past four months. I haven't gone out and actively searched for these. They were on my property and at the local school. How many other birds are doing this? Building with plastic, using plastic in other ways? Ingesting plastic? Getting tangled up in plastic? How many other creatures? In every part of our world?

Just since starting this blog, along with the myriad of ocean life ingesting and getting caught in plastic, I've read about cows, elephants, lugworms, bees and ants, and just yesterday, a platypus.

I think one would be safe to conclude, plastic now affects every being on this planet.