Litter, Litter Everywhere!

 Is it just me, or is our litter problem getting worse? I live on a country road in Maryland, and every day there are more plastic bottles, McDonald’s sacks, beer cans, paper napkins, and Big Gulp containers than the day before.

One of the many ways that plastic trash can affect the health and growth of
wildlife. Photo by Ian Kirk from Broadstone, Dorset, UK CC BY 2.0

Not only is the litter unsightly, it harms wildlife. One of the reasons animals get hit by cars is that they are attracted to roadsides and medians by the delicious smells of our litter. The last couple of times I’ve gone up Interstate 81, a 60- or- so-mile stretch from Hagerstown, MD, to Harrisburg, PA, I’ve noted ten or more dead birds of prey along the median - an alarmingly high number for that amount of space! The median is covered with litter, which no doubt attracts mice, which no doubt attract red-tailed hawks, which are no match for the steady stream of 18-wheelers going down the road at 65 miles per hour.

Food trash on the side of an Arkansas highway

I keep thinking about four possible explanations for all this litter. First, we are eating more and more crap from fast food restaurants and gas stations, which require plastic forks, plates, and cups, and paper napkins. We buy this unhealthy stuff, eat it in our cars, and then pitch it out the window. It makes me sad to think that most of the litter is from completely unnecessary purchases of so-called food that, for health reasons, we shouldn’t be consuming in the first place - and that we’re consuming our meals in our cars instead of at home with our families.

Second, in some places, local governments are providing fewer services, including trash collection. In our rural area, we have to pay for both trash collection and recycling, and they are expensive. Some of our neighbors choose to pay a smaller fee and haul their own trash to the dump. And some people choose to throw their trash on the side of the road: big kitchen garbage bags full of waste, television sets, tires, and all kinds of other things that cost big money to get rid of.

Third, I wonder if the increasing litter is a sign of Americans’ decreasing interest in the social contract. We don’t trust our government, we don’t like our neighbors, we feel this country isn’t giving us enough, and so we don’t mind junking up the roadways, even in our own neighborhoods. Think I’m making this up? I was talking to someone just the other day who said he never used to litter but now he does. His explanation? “I hate this #%!*ing state!”

Finally, I can’t help but think that the litter problem is related to our attenuated relationship with nature. Important books have been written in recent years about how we are spending less time in nature and how that harms us physically, emotionally, and psychologically - especially children. Perhaps people do not appreciate nature as a rich setting that we share with trees and animals and insects and depend on for clean air and water; perhaps instead people see it as empty space, a wasteland that may as well be trashed as not.

What do you think?

Stoopid Birds!

I often hear people make comments along the lines of: “Today a bird flew right into my window. Stoopid bird!” or “Stoopid ducks - why are they crossing a busy highway?”

But what’s really stupid - or maybe “silly” or “surprising” or even “horrifying” is the better word - is that we as humans have the expectation that wild birds should figure out our unnatural human world and make accommodations for it. In the last few decades, we seem to reason, wild birds should have evolved an understanding of reflective windows in houses and how dangerous they are. And they certainly should have figured out what a highway is and how to avoid it, even if it is inconveniently located between a prime nesting spot and a desired body of water.

"Barn Swallow," by Linda Tanner CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

In fact, birds make surprising accommodations to our human world and its infringement on their own. In The Bluebird Effect (one of my favorite books!), naturalist and artist Julie Zickefoose writes that in multiple incidents recorded in the U.S. and Japan, barn swallows have figured out how to open the sliding glass doors in big-box stores and warehouses. They identify the motion-activated electric eye unit and hover in front of it until the doors slide open. Then the birds quickly fly in (or out) before the doors close. Successive generations learn the technique from their parents, such that a Home Depot in Maplewood, Minnesota, has had a barn swallow colony return every year to nest inside the store since 2000!

"Put Me Back! House Finch Greets the World,"
by John Flannery CC BY-SA 2.0

And this article and video summarize a recent experiment by Mexican scientists seeking to explain why urban house finches have the odd behavior of stuffing discarded cigarette butts into their nests. The scientists theorize that it’s a pest-control technique: the cigarette butts ward off blood-sucking ticks that otherwise infest their nests. It turns out that nicotine has some anti-parasite properties.

Despite these happy stories, overall our human world is changing the bird world much too fast for the birds to keep up. Bird numbers are declining - alarmingly fast for some species - because we’re clearing their habitat, poisoning the insects they eat and the water they drink, interfering with their migration by putting windmills in their path and lighting up the night sky, and so on. (For more information, see the 2016 State of North America's Birds report.)

Even the clever little house finches haven’t yet caught on that those discarded cigarette butts - one of the world’s greatest sources of environmental pollution, by the way - are causing genetic damage to their chicks by interfering with cell division. But doesn’t that make us humans, the ones who throw out the cigarette butts in the first place, the stoopid ones?