"Researchers in Europe found everyday plastics, especially farmers’ baler twine, being used by the birds as a building material and entangling their young. It is a problem that affects other species too, say experts in the US, UK and Argentina" 

"On a late spring morning in the farmlands of southern Portugal, Dr Marta Acácio set her ladder against a tree and began to climb. Four metres up, she reached the giant white stork nest that was her goal. She knew from telescopic camera shots there was a healthy looking chick inside – and now she wanted to ring it.

But when Acácio, an ecologist from University of Montpellier in France, tried to scoop up the chick, it would not come away: it was tethered to the nest by a piece of plastic baler twine. She turned the chick over and recoiled: its belly was a mass of maggots.

“It was being eaten alive from underneath,” says Acácio."

Aisling Irwin reports for the Guardian July 14, 2025. [2]