Plastic Bag In Our Tree

Written by Leo Berry, Age 9, Helping Ninja, Creator/ Founder

Today we were looking outside our upstairs window and my mom said, “Leo, look outside!”

I said, “What is out there?”

I looked again.

At first I thought that it was a white bird then I looked closer and it really was a plastic bag!

I was really worried about the birds.

This is really not good.

I wonder how many birds die from plastic. I decided to google it and learn.

How many much birds die from plastic bags? Sea birds that die is 1,000,000 million.

Marine animals that die from plastic is one hundred million a year.

This makes me feel sad.

Animals on land can die too from plastic. I can’t find a statistic but I can bet its a lot.

I now want to know how what happens to birds if they get caught in a plastic bag. So, I look up if land birds can get hurt from plastic.

And, yes they can.

It’s really sad

I learned that birds can’t fly if they are entangled in plastic. The plastic bag could get wrapped around the birds wings and keep them from flying. If they are unable to fly they die of starvation. Or they may use the plastic for nesting materials and hurt there young.

This made me ask the question, ‘What happens to animals if they eat plastic bags?”

I found this on a website about plastic pollution and wildlife:

Plastic bags, once ingested, cannot be digested or passed by an animal so it stays in the gut. Plastic in an animal’s gut can prevent food digestion and can lead to a very slow and painful death.

As plastic bags can take up to 1,000 years to break down.

And, once an animal dies and decays after ingesting plastic, the plastic is then freed back into the environment to carry on killing other wildlife.

This is not good.

My mom said we are going to figure out how to get the plastic bag down from the tree.