When US sailors first set foot on Midway (then called Brooks) in 1867, the birds were so numerous on the ground that the men could not walk without stepping on the chicks in their nests. Now we can accomplish the same results without traveling to a remote atoll to do it in person.
8 comments
November 2, 2009 at 11:19 am
Tybalt
This broke my heart.
November 2, 2009 at 11:38 am
Ahistoricality
That is, without a doubt, one of the most disturbing photo sets I’ve ever seen. Now I have to decide whether to use it in the last week of my World History survey, when I talk about environmentalism, globalization….
November 2, 2009 at 12:07 pm
JPool
God damn, that’s horrifying.
November 2, 2009 at 12:25 pm
Michael Elliott
My son and I worked are way through the Attenborough BBC series on “The Life of Birds” recently, and so I found this particularly horrifying. The wandering albatross, he (my son) will tell you has the largest wingspan of any bird, and we now have a poster that he made attesting to this fact hanging in our living room. They (the albatrosses) are stunningly graceful fliers. Though pretty terrible landers. Anyhow, I’m pretty sure I’m not ready to let him see this.
November 2, 2009 at 12:35 pm
bitchphd
It’s very depressing, and those pictures have definitely made me more conservative about acquiring plastic crap or things packaged in plastic crap.
November 2, 2009 at 1:22 pm
Goldrush
Ahistoricality, I included the nugget that it would take 2-1/2 Earths to enable the rest of the world to live like US citizens in environmental issues units in survey courses. I’d see the light come on over at least one student’s head every term.
November 2, 2009 at 2:11 pm
Aunt Deb
For more on the huge floating garbage patches of the sea, you can read Curt Ebbesmayer’s recent book “Flotsametrics”. I recently attended a conference at which Ebbesmayer spoke; he showed a slide of one of these little albatrosses and talked about the effect these huge messes of plastic bits and pieces are having on pelagic birds. He urged everyone who beachcombs to pick up a bag of little bits of plastic every time you go to the shore.
One of the first times I was down at the beach, after hearing him, I was filling a bag with bottle caps and plastic straws, bits of busted sand toys, Bic lighters, and old toothbrushes when some woman came up and asked me what I was doing. I explained I was picking up garbage that had drifted in with the movement of the ocean currents. She looked at me and said, “I bet it all comes from China!”
November 4, 2009 at 5:51 pm
Neil the Ethical Werewolf
Excellent title, eric. And yeah, the pictures just blew me away.