By Founder & President Kurt Lieber
As we come to the end of 2024, several Ocean Defender Alliance (ODA) volunteers convened for our once-a-month cleanup at the Seal Beach National Wildlife Refuge (SBNWR). We met at 9am on Wednesday, December 4th.
This is just a fantastic time of year to be in the refuge, as the migrating birds start to arrive, and we get to see many species that make a quick stop as they move south!
They use these wetlands to rest up and feast on the plants and critters that give them the energy they need to make these amazing migrations.
I made the drive down from my home in Ventura the day before. This allows me to avoid the morning traffic jam through Los Angeles, and I get to the wetlands before dark so I can scope out where we can be most effective at removing as much plastic as possible in the three hours we have there.
As I look around for the spots for us to work on, I also take time to see who just flew in, since the last time I was here. I saw flocks of buffleheads, Canada geese and a bird I rarely see: Say’s phoebe, part of the flycatcher family of birds.
The ever-present great blue herons (GBH) were there as well as the white herons. At this time of year, they’re showing off their breeding plumage, which you can see on this gorgeous GBH. Their feathers grow longer and have an iridescent shine on them -- better to attract the ladies!
Because only a few people are allowed into the refuge, the birds are less afraid of people and if you are still enough and don’t move quickly you can get relatively close to them. This is how I got to view this amazing red-tailed hawk.
I was there at a low tide and found three places that had hundreds of pounds of plastic just waiting for our team to haul out. I felt good when I went to bed that night excited to know that we’d be getting so much of this toxic stuff out of harm’s way.
Our loyal Plastic Patrol showed up right on time at 9am, and we all headed to our first site. As soon as we parked our cars, I saw that the tide had really come up. Everything that I had seen the night before was now… underwater. Dang it!
After a short discussion about what to do, everyone just resigned themselves to getting wet and dirty.
By 9:15am everyone was geared up and ready to go. On hand were: Hannah Markel, Dave and Jean Merrill, Kent Morris, Linda Nicholes, and me.
For the next two-and-a-half-hours we sloshed around in the water and muck picking out plastics of all sorts. Disposable water bottles, food wrappers, food containers, polystyrene (Styrofoam), rubber balls, and hundreds of bottle caps…
Jean found the most unusual find of the day, a kiddie pool. How the heck did that thing make it all the way into the refuge?
We stopped around 11:30am, and, after taking a few pictures to document our haul, we all headed home.
While this wasn’t one of our most productive days here, it was still very rewarding knowing that we got about 250 pounds of debris out of the water. I’m sure we saved some animals from ingesting some plastics that look like food to them.
This was our last SBNWR cleanup for 2024, but we’ll be back at it in the new year. Looking at our totals for the year, we had 7 successful outings, which resulted in a total of 3,770 pounds of marine debris being removed. That’s almost TWO TONS! It takes a lot of plastic – which is so light weight – to add up to that.
If you live in the Southern California area and can occasionally free up the first Wednesday morning of the month, we’d love to do this muc-needed (and satifying) work with you! Please email us at volunteer@oceandefenders.org
