Talking about the plastic bag problem, weren’t we?
Here’s one idea: Stop buying (&selling!) those small plastic bags of kids’ snacks. For heaven’s sake — surely it’s possible for parents, carers, or kids themselves, to put a banana or a couple of crackers & cheese or even a home baked cookie in a school lunch box? (Home-baked cookie? What’s that?) The amount of $$$ that manufacturers & supermarkets must be making from selling this stuff must be immense. (as for the $$$ spent by families!) But the main problem as I see it, is the amount of plastic around this (mostly) rubbish food. As an illustration, yesterday I walked along a path adjoining a fence of the local primary school and picked up what is shown in the accompanying photo. I could have gathered more. The path that forms that part of my walk is no more than 500 metres. Over the (wire) school fence I could see even more of the same junk congregating along the fence line, where little piles of similar dropped plastic were fluttering along, aided by a breeze. A small creek is near the path where I walked. This creek turns into a concrete drain for a while to enable it to flow under a main road not far away. Water from this creek/drain flows towards the sea, where it ultimately dumps not only water, but the remnants of all this discarded stuff. I see at least two problems: One is the pollution of waterways and sea with plastic — and the other is pollution of land fill, wherever rubbish is dumped. Rubbish that is comprised of plastic in all its guises. We can try to collect plastic bags to hopefully recycle. (That’s not working, apparently). We can limit bag distribution by retailers, but while nearly every little and big thing we buy comes encased in plastic, we are defeated, no matter what we do. BUT please look at the photo and imagine almost every kid in every school in every state having a couple of these snacks in their lunch box. Some empty packs will find their way to the rubbish bin, others will accidentally flutter off to ‘nowhere land’ and end up in the sea. The primary school near my home has over a thousand pupils. I wonder how many of them have a snack in a plastic bag each day. Some Maths . . .a thousand kids, 200 school days per year, just one snack per kid each day . . . try 200,000 small plastic bags a year . . .every year . . . aarrgghh! (and that’s not including the cling wrap around the sandwiches & other food . . . !) Do we give up?
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A distressed magpie lark arrived on our back veranda in March of this year (’22). She fluttered around for a while, stopping every so often to peck furiously at her right foot. Alarmingly, we saw that her foot was bound tightly in a tangle of fine nylon blue thread. The toes on that foot were useless for standing or perching.
She flew up close to us and we guessed she was looking for help. But try as we did, time and time again, to catch her — sometimes attempting to throw a soft towel over her — she would not allow herself to be captured. To lure her closer, we presented some bird seed (Wild Bird Mix), which she ate quickly, although always wary of our too-close approach. Days went by and Birdie (as I had started to call her) spent a lot of time on our veranda, still pecking vainly at the thread around the, by now, useless foot. It was a mystery as to how her foot had become so entangled in such a way. She started anticipating the small pile of seeds we offered each day and would often be waiting at the glass back door when we came out at breakfast time. As Birdie picked and picked at her mangled right foot, little by little — over months — some of the crippling thread came off. But it was too late. By now, one toe had withered and shrunk, the others bent and useless. We became used to Birdie’s company when we sat out on the veranda. Through all seasons she would join us, perched one-legged on the back of a chair. We continued to leave small amounts of seed and, if we ever left any crumbs on the table after a meal, she would fly in and finish them off, always waiting for us to leave first. She eventually started adjusting to her crippled foot and occasionally hopped using both feet, albeit with her right one a backwards facing stump. For eight months or so we have had Birdie as our veranda companion and lately, guess what – she has brought along a boyfriend! They are obviously a pair, and he often shares the seed we put out — sometimes being over-bossy and pushing Birdie out of the way, so that he can eat first. (!). Now we are waiting to see if Birdie and her mate have a secret nest somewhere nearby and wonder if any offspring might make our back veranda a visiting place. I feel sure that our Birdie story gives yet another indication of intelligence present in other creatures. |
Author notesI choose to comment on social issues and write creatively on a variety of subjects - for a variety of audiences.
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