Banish the balloons
They kill wildlife and are worse than straws, say campaigners
THEY may seem like harmless fun, but balloons are a real threat to wildlife, a conservation charity warned yesterday.
Around 100 councils have banned large balloon releases because of the risk they pose to animals. Yesterday, the BBC’s Comic Relief campaign came under fire for giving out hundreds of thousands of ‘wildlife-killing’ red balloons in its fundraising packs, with each one containing five. Conservationist group Blue Planet Society said it showed ‘an embarrassing lack of environmental awareness’.
John Hourston, founder of the society, said balloons were even more of an environmental threat than plastic straws.
Comic Relief’s use of plastic red noses has also come in for criticism. But broadcaster Emma Freud, executive producer of Red Nose Day, said the fundraising packs ‘ will raise around £8million to support people living in poverty’ and that the red noses can be recycled at branches of Sainsbury’s.
In 2011, children at Lyndhurst Primary School in Camberwell, south-east London, released hundreds of helium balloons to support Comic Relief. But one landed over 50 miles away in Kent, where a 13-month-old bullock choked to death on its string. Farmer Richard Vant, 50, who found the dead animal with the balloon it its mouth was given compensation.
Despite being biodegradable, latex balloons can last in the environment for around four years, according to the Marine Conservation Society. A Comic Relief spokesman said: ‘We advise all our fundraisers to use and dispose of the balloons responsibly and adopt the “Don’t Let Go” policy.’ They added that they have removed some plastic items from fundraising packs and are reviewing future materials.
The Daily Mail has highlighted the scourge of global plastic pollution with its Turn The Tide On Plastic campaign. And 120,261 volunteers have already signed up for this year’s Great British Spring Clean, a Keep Britain Tidy campaign in partnership with the Mail.
The seals face a long, slow and painful death ‘It was deeply embedded in her flesh — really grim’
THE PINK frisbee was digging so deeply into the seal’s neck that she couldn’t eat, while the infection from the massive wound it had created was rampaging around her body.
So, desperately thin and ill, she took herself off from the rest of her herd on Horsey Beach in Norfolk to die.
But it was actually the best thing she could have done. Because for weeks a group of selfless volunteers had been watching her and waiting for this moment. And on December 19 last year, they pounced.
Managing to scoop the seal up in a huge net, they loaded her into a van and drove her to the RSPCA’s East Winch Wildlife Centre, just over an hour away.
There, the experts took over. Sadly, she wasn’t the first seal they had seen with such an injury.
Just a year before, they had rescued another grey seal with a frisbee around its neck from the same cold waters and, after a desperate struggle, managed to save its life.
The story of Frisbee, as she became known, was covered extensively in the media — including the Daily Mail — and her eventual release back into the water last February was a huge event. But it seems holidaymakers have learned nothing from the story.
The impact of plastic and litter pollution on Britain’s seal populations has been well documented. The RSPCA has seen the mammals trapped in everything from huge sheets of plastic and netting to discarded bikinis.
But frisbees, the ones shaped like a ring, with the middle removed to make them more aerodynamic, seem to be a particular problem. If they get lost in the water, or are abandoned on the beach, they become an utter menace for wildlife.
Alison Charles, manager of the RSPCA’s East Winch Wildlife Centre, explains: ‘The problem is that younger seals, the adventurers, see these frisbees in the water and want to play with them.
‘The frisbee slips over their heads — and once it’s on, it stays on.’
It becomes embedded in the animal’s flesh, causing horrendous injury and infection, weakening the animal so it cannot feed or breathe. It’s a long, slow and very painful death.
The hot summer of 2018 has resulted in at least four more seals being tracked on Norfolk beaches with frisbees trapped around their necks, awaiting rescue. And because they travel for miles between beaches and even countries, spotting them — let alone helping them — is extremely difficult.
There were just two reported cases in 2008 — compared to eight with plastic injuries seen by the East Winch team last year. And they’re just the ones that have been noted. The real problem could be much worse.
Making things even more difficult is the fact that seals are notoriously hard to catch. Their strength, huge size (they can weigh up to 680lb) and timidity makes them extremely dangerous to humans, and rescuers have to wait until they are nearly dead before acting.
‘Their natural instinct is to flee into the water and they’re faster than us,’ says Alison. ‘The only way we can get them is to wait for them to become weaker. Only when they feel awful can you catch them. It’s horrible.’
And so it was with Pinkafo when she was first seen last autumn (each year, the RSPCA chooses a new theme for naming its rescue seals; last year it was breeds of horse)
It was only in mid-December that she was sick enough for the volunteers who had been watching her from the Friends Of Horsey Seals and the Marine And Wildlife Rescue to step in.
‘The frisbee was deeply embedded, really grim,’ says Alison, who has worked with seals for more than 30 years. ‘ We couldn’t get through the plastic with scissors so had to use strong secateurs. Once we’d got it off, we bathed the wound and gave her pain relief and antibiotics.
‘That night, I went home really not sure if she would make it. We’d done everything we could, but it could still kill her.’
Thankfully, Pinkafo made it through the night. ‘She was still alive, but in a lot of discomfort,’ says Alison. ‘She didn’t move, didn’t want to eat and for three days lay upside down in her pool which was filled with heavily salted water to help the healing process. We really thought we were in trouble with her.
‘But on day four, she turned the right way up in the pool — she was obviously feeling better and the drugs had started to work. It was amazing, like a switch had flicked.’
Within a few days, she was well enough to be moved to a bigger, heavily salted, pool for a month. She’s now enjoying life in a deep outside pool with another seal who’s suffered a plastic injury — this time from fishing netting — called Suffolk Punch.
‘Now we have to give her lots of good nutrition and physiotherapy while she is eating,’ says Alison. ‘The team make her work hard for her fish — she has to swim from one side of the pool to the other to stretch her neck and hopefully reduce the chance of her scar tissue stopping her being able to fish properly when she’s released.
‘Pinkafo is putting on weight, which is a good sign — she was just 120lb — a third of what she should be — in December, but is now more than 220lb.’
But she’s still not out of the woods — it was five months before her predecessor, Frisbee, could be released back into the wild.
Rehabilitating seals like this is a very expensive business. On top of staff costs and keeping the centre going, each week every seal costs the RPSCA £27.30 for food (generally their favourite, mackerel), £18.68 on drugs including painkillers, antiinflammatories and antibiotics, and anything from £78 to £156 on salt to go in their pool.
And the bills are set to keep increasing because the number of seals brought to the RSPCA with plastic injuries is getting higher each year. ‘I’ve no idea why plastic became such a big problem so quickly,’ says Alison.
She remembers the first injury the RSPCA had ever seen. It was in 2008 and a one-year- old grey seal they called Kabul (capital cities were the theme that year) was brought in with fishing net wrapped tightly around his neck.
He’d been found on a Yorkshire beach and weighed just 52lb.
‘ I couldn’t believe what I was looking at,’ says Alison. ‘It was a horrible wound and it really shocked us. I’d never seen a plastic injury, let alone anything like that.’
Sadly, despite heroic efforts by her team, Kabul didn’t have a happy ending. Even though they removed the netting and pumped him full of antibiotics to try to stem the infection raging through his body, he died a few weeks later.
Thankfully, the second seal to come in that year with plastic injuries (again, from fishing netting) survived.
A few months later, in early 2009, came a baby seal with a clear plastic ring around its neck, a precursor to frisbees. Travellers Rest, as she became known because of her long journey to Norfolk from the Northumberland beach she was found on, also survived.
So, a few years ago after realising the plastic problem was only getting worse, Alison went to the Sea Mammal Research Unit in Scotland to learn how to catch and treat the animals.
‘The first time, I was standing on a sandbank with what was essentially a hula hoop with some netting on it, ready to throw it over the seal’s head and I could feel this huge seal thundering towards me, the ground was shaking and I was thinking: “Oh dear, what am I doing?”
‘You have to throw the net hula hoop over its head as it’s charging toward the water — it’s not for the faint-hearted — and all I could hear was the guy training me shouting “get out of the way!” because I was about to be bulldozed. I realised I
had to stand to the side of them rather than in front of them.’
Once the net has gone over the seal, others have to rush in to help keep the seal on the beach or it will drag itself — and its captor — into the sea.
‘You have to hang on to that net for dear life,’ says Alison.
She’s since passed on her knowledge to fellow RSPCA staff and volunteers. But while they wait for seals to be sick enough to be rescued, the public grow evermore concerned about those spotted on the beach.
The RSPCA and other charities are constantly fielding calls from people who can’t understand why the creatures cannot just be rescued immediately.
Alison says: ‘People get frustrated, but you have just one chance to catch the seals — they’re intelligent animals and the more times you try, the less chance you have. So there’s a lot of discussion about when it’s going to be.
‘There are only certain times of the year when you can catch them — you often can’t do it when they’re pupping between November and January because the last thing we want to do is separate a mum and pup.’
Now the Friends Of Horsey Seals put signs up around the Norfolk beach to tell concerned beachgoers that they’re aware of the problem and are dealing with it.
Sadly, not all suffering seals can be caught. ‘There was one with a brown plastic ring around its neck that we think we may have lost,’ says Alison.
‘ It was really struggling to breathe one day so we went down to get it but it got away. Hopefully, it will come back — they often do.’
If not, the seal will have become yet another innocent victim of Britain’s self- created plastic pollution nightmare.