Pollution comes in all shapes and size but even at its smallest it can prove fatal for wildlife.



Tiny plastic pellets, called nurdles, have become a huge problem for animals living in and around our coasts and the Irish Sea.

Your Wildlife Trust will be joining concerned nature lovers all over the country on a Great Winter Nurdle Hunt on Saturday, February 4.

They will be looking for the pellets used to create the majority of our plastic products when they are melted together. However they tend to be transported in nurdle-form and spilled from ships or at refuse tips, where they enter the water supply and end up in the sea.

Today all of our beaches are blighted by nurdles and, because they look like fish eggs or small crustaceans, they can be mistakenly eaten by birds.

Wildlife Trust Assistant Marine Community Engagement Officer Helen Hiley said: “They get into the bird’s stomach making them feel full which means they don’t eat real food which can lead to starvation.”

Scottish Environmental Charity FIDRA, which is leading The Great Winter Nurdle Hunt, reported: “Post mortems of gulls, terns, fulmars, puffins and other animals in our seas have been found with nurdles in their stomachs.

“In the North Sea 95 per cent of fulmars studies contained plastic – astonishingly 273 nurdles were recovered from one bird’s stomach.”

Nurdles are often shaped like lentils and are around 5mm in diameter. Being mainly clear, white or yellow as they get older, they are quite difficult to spot in the sand.

While FIDRA admits there is no practical way to remove nurdles from the sea it wants to stop the problem getting worse.

Wildlife Trust Marine Community Engagement Officer Sally Tapp said: “The Great Winter Nurdle Hunt is all about drawing attention to this problem, the evidence is there on all our beaches. If everyone goes to their local beach and finds nurdles it will put pressure on the plastic industry to take more care when they are dealing with nurdles.”

Helen added: “If we collect a jam jar full of nurdles we can persuade friends and colleagues to collect their own, which will help to clean up the beaches but also show how bad this problem really is.”

The Wildlife Trust’s part of The Great Winter Nurdle Hunt takes place on Crosby Beach, from 10am to noon. Everyone is welcome to attend