Covid masks killing birds in PPE pandemic
Animals in every continent are being caught in plastic waste, with face coverings among the worst offenders
‘Some birds have been hurt from masks tangled around their legs and beaks, others suffer after ingesting the fabric’
FACE masks are entangling birds across the world, with plastic pollution now affecting avian populations in every continent, research shows.
Birds and Debris, an online citizen science project, is collecting photographs from around the world of birds nesting or entangled in waste.
Nearly a quarter of the photos taken show birds caught up in personal protective equipment (PPE), with the majority being disposable face coverings, the researchers said.
The project, run by researchers at the Environmental Research Institute, part of the North Highland College UHI and the University of the Highlands and Islands, has been running for four years.
Recent reports to the project include a herring gull flying near John o’groats with a black plastic bag hanging from its foot, a bird nest near Bogota, Colombia, containing plastic string, and a dead grey heron in Mauritania with fish netting wrapped around its beak.
Dr Alex Bond, one of the researchers involved in the project from the Natural History Museum in London, said human debris impacting avian wildlife is a “global issue”.
He added: “When you start looking for this stuff, you’ll see it everywhere,” he told the BBC. “We had reports from Japan, Australia, Sri Lanka, the UK, North America.”
Since its launch, the website has had hundreds of reports of either entanglement or nest incorporation of debris. In the study, published in the journal Science of the Total Environment, the researchers examined 114 reports about PPE and found the majority (95) were of birds entangled or incorporating the pandemic waste into their nests.
Most of the sightings were in the US (29), England (16), Canada (13) and Australia (11), but photos from 23 different countries, including Germany, France, Finland, India and Italy, were also included. “It’s almost all masks,” Dr Bond said.
“And if you think of the different materials a surgical mask is made from – there’s the elastic that we see tangled around birds’ legs or we might see birds injured by trying to ingest the fabric or the hard piece of plastic that secures it over your nose.
“So we use this catch–all term of ‘plastic’ but it’s a whole range of different polymers, and masks are a good example of that.” Estimates have suggested 129 billion face masks and 65 billion gloves were used monthly at the height of the pandemic globally.
The majority of disposable Covid masks are made from plastic that cannot biodegrade but may break down into microplastics that spread into the environment.
Previous research has suggested 1.6billion disposable masks ended up in the ocean in 2020.
Of 114 sightings reported, 106 (93 per cent) were masks, according to the study.
Other debris included disposable gloves, in one case gloves and face masks were both entangled in a nest, the authors said.
Nine animals were found dead in direct contact with PPE, but the majority of the animals’ fates were unknown because the observers could not capture them to remove the rubbish.