Last March I uploaded a photo of a dead Gannet I found on Chesil Beach, Dorset, UK in 2002. It had been strangled by a discarded fishing line and I was horrified at its fate, yet even in its death it had beauty.
Unfortunately this is not an uncommon problem, and a couple of days ago the beautiful Gannet, (in the pictures below), had washed up onto my local beach in Kent. As I moved it to work out why it had died, I again was horrified. This time the bird had been killed by black plastic twine, which had tangled and tied around its wing and then (I imagine in what would have been a frenzy of sheer panic in its efforts to un-teather its wing) has got the same twine wrapped around its beak, so locked and trapped it either drowned or just died of exhaustion. The bird was a large adult, fairly fresh, handsome and clean, apart from the deadly twine. Plastic does not just pollute, it kills.
