© Alex BondSome chicks have been found on Lord Howe Island with over 200 pieces of plastic in them, from biro lids to LEGO pieces
How this is impacting wildlife is of great concern to scientists, with new research suggesting that it may be having long-term health impacts on seabirds.
The tropical idyll of Lord Howe Island, located 600 kilometres off the eastern coast of Australia, is home to a few hundred people but tens of thousands of seabirds.
Despite their isolation, the birds that nest on the island are some of the most plastic contaminated birds in the world. Rather than feeding their chicks the usual diet of fish, adult flesh-footed shearwaters have been providing their young with shards of plastic, including bottle tops, pieces of Lego and biro lids.
In some years between 80 and 90% of all chicks studied have at least one piece of plastic in their stomach. In one extreme case 274 pieces, weighing 64 grams, were found in a single bird.
Comment: The last 2 years or so has seen a notable number of these extralimital records of tropical seabirds in North America, presumably for the most part due to the increasingly chaotic weather, here's a list of such reports: Bird from the tropics, the brown booby, seen for first time in New Hampshire
Wrong place, wrong time: Tropical seabird turns up at Point Pelee, Ontario
Rare sighting of frigatebird in Wausau, Wisconsin, a likely hurricane refugee
Rare red-billed tropicbird turns up in Gulf Breeze, Florida
Wrong place, wrong time: Nazca Booby from the Galapagos Islands turns up at Dana Point, Califorina
Although displacement caused by severely adverse weather conditions seems the most plausible explanation in most cases, the following extract from a 2015 report of a brown booby turning up near Cape Race in Canada, indicates that at least some of these seabirds had been getting lost due to other factors: