One man’s trash is a common coot’s treasure, at least when it comes to plastic.
In Amsterdam, the birds have been constructing nests out of plastic food wrappers, masks and other waste for at least 30 years, researchers report in the February Ecology. The revelation shows not only how much plastic now litters the environment but also the power of using human-made products to learn about the natural world.
“It’s ironic to think that many of these plastic single-use items have just been used for minutes by people, yet these coots have used them for decades,” says Auke-Florian Hiemstra, a biologist at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, Netherlands.