A heartbreaking photo showing a mother bird attempting to feed its chick a cigarette butt picked up off the beach has quickly gone viral, highlighting the devastating effects our pollution problems can have on wildife, CTV News reported.
The photo has ignited a call for cleaner public beaches to avoid any more animals mistaking our dangerous trash for food.
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A Florida woman was walking along St. Pete Beach last week, armed with her camera to photograph local bird populations.
Karen Mason, an avid photographer, had journeyed to the beach to grab a few snaps of birds in an attempt to educate beach-goers about the wildlife they share their space with. That was when she noticed an adult black skimmer bird and its chick in the sand.
“I happened to see this parent feeding a chick and I could tell it was not a fish, but I really didn’t know.”
Mason resorted to using her camera’s long lens to snap some pics of the avian pair, not giving much thought to what exactly it was she had spotted the mother trying to feed its baby.
It wasn’t until much later, when Mason was uploading the photos to her computer, that she realized what exactly she had taken a picture of.
After zooming in on the photos to get a closer look, she was startled to find that the mother was feeding its chick trash.
Worse than that, the trash was a discarded cigarette butt.
“I was just furious,” Mason said. “Obviously, she had no idea what she was feeding her chick.”
Filled with rage over the disgusting scene, she decided to share the shocking photo to every Facebook page she is a part of in an effort to spread awareness about the state of our own beaches.
According to Mason, cigarette butts are a huge problem at local beaches, and she intended to shine a spotlight on that issue, particularly its relation to wildlife.
“It was just appalling to me to see what was happening there,” she said. “The cigarette butts are such a huge problem. People just think, ‘Oh it’s just a little tiny butt, it’s made out of paper, blah blah blah,’ but it’s a lot more than that.”
In fact, a recent study has found that cigarette butts are the single greatest source of ocean trash on our planet.
Although plastics may seem to deserve this dishonor, discarded butts are actually the most commonly collected item on beaches, with more than 60 million butts picked up out of the sand and surf over the last 32 years.
Mason posted a series of disturbing photos to her Facebook page, showing the birds carrying the cigarette in their beaks.
In one post , she included the caption, “If you smoke, please don’t leave your butts behind.”
In another she wrote, “It’s time we cleaned up our beaches and stopped treating them like one giant ash tray,” also adding the hashtag #nobuttsforbabies.
In response to the shocking pictures, people online have expressed their horror and outrage.
“This is absolutely unbelievable,” one person wrote on Facebook. “This will hopefully shock people into realizing what impact humans are making to this planet.”
“We must learn to treat our Earth like the treasure it is,” another added.
Others have called for smokers to “quit using beaches like their own personal ashtrays” and suggested there be some kind of punishment for people who leave their discarded butts behind in the sand.
Mason said she hopes the photos remind people to “think twice” before littering.
“We have to realize this is not just happening in one little area, this is everywhere. Even if you’re not on St. Pete Beach it doesn’t mean it’s not something that affects you where you are,” Mason said.
She added, “We just need to start taking care of things, taking care of our Earth.”
h/t: CTV News
