Our “crunchy birds” make international news

For the 2025 “plastic season” (field work on stunning, UNESCO World Heritage listed Lord Howe Island), the Adrift Lab team were joined by Greens Senator, Peter Whish-Wilson. This was Peter’s first time on the island, but as a long-time campaigner for waste management in Australia, he was well aware of the confronting scenes he’d likely face.

In reality, nothing could prepare him, or us, for what eventuated…

On Day 1 of the season, we broke our long-standing (15 year) record for the total amount of ingested plastic in a single bird. The stats are remarkable for all the wrong reasons. The young bird (only 80-90 days old) contained 778 pieces of plastic – that roughly equates to it’s parents feeding it around 10 pieces of plastic for every day the chick had been alive. This bird, and so many others in recent years, now contain such enormous quantities of plastic that when our research team gently presses on their stomachs, we hear awful crunching noises as the plastics shift around inside. We literally call them “crunchy birds” because…what other name could we give them.

This year we decided we’re no longer going to say to each other “it can’t possibly get worse” because each year it just does. Terms like “unprecedented” and “horrific” really don’t do it justice. As scientists on the front lines of the environment/pollution/biodiversity crises, we can barely begin to describe what witnessing this for two decades has done to our mental and physical well being. For the senior research team, it’s particularly difficult watching the youngest and newest members of our research team bear witness to something so horrible. Especially while the rest of the world ignorantly touts phrases like “sure, we stuffed it up, but young kids these days are so tech-savy, they’ll fix it”.

Enough already. Do your bit!

ABC News (written article – click here)

ABC News (video clip – click here)

The Washington Post (written article – link coming soon)