A bird’s nest buried deep in the canals of Amsterdam has uncovered a hidden history of human waste stretching back three decades.
Nest researcher Auke-Florian Hiemstra discovered that Eurasian coots are unknowingly preserving our plastic pollution layering their nests year after year with scraps of trash from different eras.
“You flip through these nests like through pages of a history book uncovering the past” he said.
The coots of Amsterdam never used to reuse their nests as they were made of fast-decaying plant material but in urban environments they have turned to plastic.
Unlike twigs and reeds plastic doesn’t break down meaning each breeding season’s additions are stacked on top of the last creating a growing archive of waste.
One nest found in the Rokin canal contains at least 10 generations of plastic with the deepest layers dating back to the early 1990s when coots first started breeding in the city.
“The oldest layer is as old as me—all my life a bird was nesting here” said Hiemstra.
Some pieces of waste are easy to date. A Mars bar wrapper promoting the USA 1994 FIFA World Cup sits deep in the nest while the uppermost layers contain face masks from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Another nest along the Onbekende Gracht features the same telltale mask layer evidence of how global events leave their mark in even the most unexpected places.
Birds love a Big Mac!
The most striking find is the sheer amount of McDonald’s packaging buried in the nest. Old McChicken polystyrene containers from 1996 sit beneath modern fries sauce cups all from a nearby branch of the fast food giant.
“The McDonald’s archaeology says something about our throwaway culture and it shows that away in throwaway doesn’t actually mean anything,” Hiemstra said.
“How we interact with our environment is reflected in the canals and quite literally woven into the nests of the birds that breed there.”
Roughly 80% of all the plastic ever produced still exists and now nature itself is recording that fact.
The nest has been added to the collection at the Museon-Omniversum in The Hague where it will be displayed as part of an exhibition on the Anthropocene the era defined by human impact on the planet.
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