A love offering of plastic
Depressing moment water bird known for its romantic gestures offers its mate a potentially deadly scrap of discarded plastic
Hoping to impress its mate, this elegant waterbird offers it a present.
What the great crested grebe cannot know is that its gift is nothing more than a piece of discarded plastic.
This heartbreaking image, captured at a lake in Derbyshire, demonstrates the impact that rubbish is having on our environment.
Great crested grebes are well- known for their elaborate courtship displays. Pairs shake their heads at each other during a ‘ dance’ on the water, and dive down to collect bits of weed and plants to offer to their partner.
This grebe, however, surfaced with only a piece of potentially choking plastic abandoned by thoughtless humans.
Photographer Mary Wilde, who took the picture on a lake near Clay Cross, south of Chesterfield, said of the ritual: ‘ It’s usually a beautiful sight. The birds dive down to offer each other bits of weed and flick their heads back and forth.
‘ It dropped the plastic back into the water afterwards. It was very sad and I thought it’s a current issue with people chucking rubbish.’
The image is the latest in a string of upsetting pictures showing how plastic is blighting our seas and oceans.
Typically these are in far away climes, with exotic creatures dying after eating plastic or becoming entangled in it.
But this latest example shows how the impact is also felt by animals much closer to home.
The great crested grebe, of which there are 4,600 breeding pairs in Britain, prefers swimming to flying and its ornate head plumes meant it was once hunted for its feathers, causing numbers to plummet.
Kaite Helps, from Derbyshire Wildlife Trust, said the birds often offered each other ‘ anything beautiful’ when attempting to win their partner over.
She added: ‘ Plastic pollution has been big news recently thanks to programmes such as the BBC’s Blue Planet, but the problem is so close to home, not just in faraway oceans, and this photo is a stark reminder of that.
‘ Plastic is clogging up our rivers and places that should be havens for wildlife.
‘ We have all contributed and we all need to make changes in order to prevent plastic waste. Plastic in the environment poses such a huge threat to wildlife because it doesn’t just disappear, it simply breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces.
‘Aside from the dangers of becoming trapped or injured, animals often ingest plastic fragments, with the potential to build up in the bodies of animals higher up the food chain.’
Plastic in the environment poses such a huge threat to wildlife because it doesn’t just disappear