By Founder and President Kurt Lieber
With the winds absolutely howling across California, several Ocean Defenders Alliance (ODA) volunteers arrived to continue our efforts to remove plastics and other man-made debris from the Seal Beach National Wildlife Refuge (SBNWR).
We do this on the first Wednesday of every month, depending on the weather conditions. Well, this day was going to be a test of our resolve…
Our regular team showed up to the Refuge at 9am, on November 6th. After a brief chat about the winds and how we felt about getting wind whipped while we cleaned up, we decided to go for it.
The crew consisted of Dennis Alp, Dave Merrill, Jean Merrill, Kent Morris, Karla Reinhardt, and me.
The mood was pretty glum, as we talked about the election results, and what it was going to mean for the environment. This is not going to be a pleasant four years for us who care about the health of the planet…
Everyone was pretty quiet as we started out, but the mood picked up as we saw what a difference we were making. Check out these before and after pictures. If you click on the first trash-filled image, you can scroll and compare it to the squeaky clean area!
BEFORE - trash row
AFTER: debris free!I had scouted out the wetlands the night before and found two sites that really needed our help. We worked on this first area for about two hours, and were feeling good enough to head over to the second site to do what we could in 30 minutes.
We needed to be out of there by 11:30am, so we got to work quickly, and removed about 200 more pounds of plastics before we had to leave.
Even with the very trying conditions, we removed about 800 pounds of plastics in total. The wind was so strong that it would blow things out of our buckets as soon as we placed things in there. Keeping the Styrofoam in the buckets was a real challenge. And boy did we find a LOT of that stuff.
Karla found two really big pieces of it. Here she is with one of them.
That material is the stuff of nightmares for all kinds of wildlife, as the birds peck away at it, ingesting small pieces because it looks like fish eggs to them. We doubtless saved many birds from a painful death.
There are many species of birds in this Refuge and seeing them makes our time here much more enjoyable. Take these green-winged teals. They are the smallest North American dabbling duck.
Example of dabbling ducks feeding (not at the SBNWR).“Dabbling” refers to ducks that primarily feed on the water’s surface, but they also can graze on land. They get their name because they “dabble” during feeding time. “Dabbling” means to move around gently in shallow water, which often stirs up the substrate and makes it easier to find plants and invertebrates.
You'll get a kick out of seeing them feed in the water: They plunge their heads under the water while the lower half of their body sticks up out of the surface.
Here is your cleanup crew with our "Catch of the Day":
After posing for these pictures, we all headed home, which for me is about 100 miles away. As I was approaching Ventura, traffic came to a screeching halt. I could see up ahead the skies were filled with smoke.
The winds were even stronger here than in Seal Beach. I could see flames shooting up from some of the hills. Fire trucks were racing to the scene, and helicopters were systematically dumping water on the hillsides.
It took me 70 minutes to go less than 10 miles on the car jammed freeway. As I approached the smoke and flames that were less than a mile from the freeway, I was reminded of what I experienced on Maui last year. I was heading into Lahaina to meet a dive operator, when for our safety, all the cars were stopped from going further and we helplessly watched for five hours as the entire town burned down. It was a tragic day.
The world is experiencing storms (winds, rains and heat) like never before, and now the US electorate has voted for a president who ran on the promise to get rid of a lot of the protections and programs that we’ve put in place to minimize the effects that burning fossil fuels has on the living planet.
It felt to me like this fire is a harbinger of what is to come from this political firestorm. I hope I am wrong…
Whatever lies in our future, you can count on ODA volunteers showing up whenever and wherever we can to help our wildlife. Despair is not going to help us, but action will!
If you're a fan of birds and want to see more of the ones the your ODA cleanup crew works to protect, check out this earlier story with a lot of great photos! When you get there, scroll down to the photo gallery at the bottom You won't be disappointed!
