Birds Saved With Recycling Bins

We did it, and it was pretty amazing.

In under 80 minutes on June 30, 2019, 12 industrious humans constructed 30 large monofilament fishing line recycling bins at the Barnard Nature Center at the West River Memorial Park, a place that sees a good bit of recreational fishing in season.

Fortuitously, the weather was beyond grand, it was sparkling and warm, but not muggy and hot, which meant we could sand, saw, and cement the bins outdoors.

That last step is quite a doozie in terms of noxious vapors, so fresh air was key for health and sanity!

Volunteers came from across many of the birding organizations in New Haven and the near coastline — from the New Haven Bird Club, The Connecticut Ornithological Association, Audubon Connecticut, Connecticut Audubon, and Menunkatuck Audubon.

We started the day with coffee and donuts and ended with pizza as a thank you for the donation of time and effort. Bin builders got to sign the bins they made so that once we complete the map of all installed bins, they will know exactly where their handiwork is doing some good out in the world.

Why did this group of awesome, caring humans come out to the Barnard Nature Center six months ago to spend a Saturday morning building monofilament fishing line recycling bins? And why did the organizing crew spend hours planning the event, identifying necessary parts, purchasing them, and physically hauling more 8‑foot 4x4s than I thought possible into the Nature Center storage area?

Put simply — to protect wildlife and divert plastics from our waterways. As birders, we care about what happens in the natural world in which we find so much delight.

We understand the delicate interplay of multivalent factors at work in an ecosystem. We see the aftereffects of human carelessness and we grieve losses.

Some readers may recall from a previous article that in September 2018, I saw a Juvenile Double Crested Cormorant lose its life to carelessly discarded monofilament fishing line.

The loss of this beautiful young bird was a completely unnecessary tragedy and came on the heels of other reports from Guilford and Bridgeport about Ospreys who lost their lives after becoming ensnared in fishing line.

In the ever-evolving human relationship to nature and wildlife, carelessness is not an option. As we can see from the state of our oceans, waterways, and land, human activities are having widespread destructive effects on every single ecosystem.

Moved by the cumulative effect of these monofilament tragedies and by seeing the horror of the Cormorant’s death up close, I felt compelled to act.

After being voted onto the board of Menunkatuck Audubon, I worked with a committed coalition of organizations (Menunkatuck Audubon, New Haven Bird Club, Friends of the Mill River, Audubon Connecticut, Connecticut Audubon, New Haven Parks and Rec, CT DEEP) to draft and submit a grant proposal to construct and deploy monofilament fishing line recycling bins across the Greater New Haven area and to train volunteers to remove accumulated lines for recycling.

Adept and excellent guides assisted me in this endeavor! Dennis Riordan, President of Menunkatuck Audubon, Craig Repasz, then President of the New Haven Bird Club, Corrie Folsom‑O’Keefe, Bird Conservation Manager for Audubon Connecticut, Chris Howe, VP of the New Haven Bird Club, Patrick Comins, ED of Connecticut Audubon.

Their input, offered over months, has proven critical to the success of this project.

In mid-January, I submitted the grant proposal to the Connecticut Ornithological Association while Dennis Riordan submitted a similar proposal to The Connecticut Society for Women Environmental Professionals (SWEP-CT). We were fortunate enough to receive both grants for a grand total of $2,000. We are forever grateful to these organizations for funding our monofilament fishing line recycling bin project.

That $2,000 went, in its entirety, to materials needed in order to construct and install the bins. It says absolutely nothing of the countless person-hours donated as a volunteer service over the past year to haul, transport, store, build, and install the bins around New Haven.

“In-kind” donations of volunteer time have been flat-out invaluable. This fall, a ​“crackerjack” crew of usual suspects stepped up to handle the installs.

The ​“elite forces” involved in this delicate mission include Dennis Riordan, president of Menunkatuck Audubon Society; Peter Davis — New Haven’s Riverkeeper Extraordinaire and one of my personal heroes, I mean it… (like really, really mean it — he is up there with Mr. Rogers, Jimmy Carter, and Jane Gooddall for me — read here , here , here , and here and you will know why), and me, now the Advocacy Chair for Menunkatuck Audubon!

While hardly brawny and admittedly wholly lacking any semblance of formal training in construction, we are quite a dedicated team and we did a heck of a lot of work together this fall. No matter what the weather was (and right up to a very chilly Dec. 15), we spent a day almost every single weekend installing monofilament fishing line recycling bins in and around New Haven: from Beaver Pond Park to the West River to Fort Nathan Hale Park, to the Sound School to Criscuolo Park, to Dover Beach, James, Lloyd, and Poplar Streets, to the waterfront all along Front Street.

I cannot express how much I admire and respect Dennis and Peter — who both selflessly donated their weekends to help me see this vision through. None of this would have happened without them.

Other occasional (but always intrepid) contributors to the installation process have been New Haven Parks and Rec Ranger Harry Coyle, Craig Repasz, Chris Howe, Lauren Chicoski, and Pat Lynch. The installations have been a labor of love and a testament to hope.

The install process involves setting an eight-foot 4”x4” three feet deep in the ground, affixing a Boat US sign about the value of recycling monofilament to the top of the post, mounting the actual bin midway on the post using brackets and metal straps, hole-sawing an opening in the top of the bin into which one discards the monofilament, and finally — slapping on a few informational stickers in English and Spanish.

Sometimes luck was on our side — our shovels and picks sliced and cleft the earth like butter. Ahhh, Beaver Ponds Park and West River at Orange Ave. — we remember your soil fondly!

But more often than not, we had to dig three feet down through rocky, gravelly impossibly resistant substrate. It was tough, back-breaking work and we were hardly a group of young strapping construction workers! But we did it and sometimes we did it with help from folks who were fishing at the spots where we were undertaking an install, how great is that?

We also had to get creative. Really creative. In some locations — Dover Beach, Lloyd and Front Streets — it made much more sense to figure out how to utilize the extant fence for mounting the bin than to dig a three-foot hole for a free-standing post.

Plus, now that it was winter, we all just really needed a break from digging those damned holes! Ultimately, using some non-linear logic to solve a 3D spatial problem set was waaaaay more appealing than brutishly thwacking a shovel and pick through 3 feet of rock. In each instance we had to craft a unique solution. We rose to each challenge.

When eight-foot 4x4s were too thick and too tall to mount to a fence, we bought six-foot 2x6s. When a chain-link fence was all that was on offer, we bought tiny safety locks to attach the Boat US signs to the fence links. When a metal fence post was the only thing stable enough to support the bin, we learned how to strap U‑brackets to fence posts. And when the post diameter was too narrow for the size straps we had with us, we figured out that we could double bracket the strap so that it was supremely taught before wrapping it around the post. With each challenge, our wits seemed to prevail.

Even better than tipping past the half-way point of our bin installations… and better yet than exercising our grey matter with 3D spatial challenges has been the response from nature lovers, fishers and anglers we have met while out in the field installing the bins!

At Fort Nathan Hale Park, we got to be a part of the dedication ceremony with New Haven Parks and Rec, Audubon Connecticut, and Mayor Toni Harp. We fielded tons of interest from the public and other organizations attending the event. At the Sound School site, people walking out onto or from the pier thanked us for what we were doing.

At Criscuolo Park, a father brought his kids over to us as we were putting the finishing touches on our bin so we could tell the kids what we were doing and why. We got to spread the message that protecting wildlife matters. On James Street, by far our favorite location at which we’ve installed a bin, an entire posse of anglers took us in as friends, grateful for what we were doing for them.

One awesome man on James Street, one lovely man, who builds fences for a living, saw how desperately we were struggling to dig our 3‑foot hole through the substrate and came over to lend a hand, even though he was sporting dress shoes and a sparklingly clean yellow button down polo.

If it had not been for our new found friend that day, we would not have been able to get that post in the ground. There was no way Dennis, Peter, and I could tackle that rocky ground. And here he was telling us he loved to work and wanted to help us, because we were helping all the anglers with our monofilament fishing line recycling bin. What a trooper! 

As this man wisely said, ​“The two things I hold dear are Mother Nature and Father Time.” I said, ​“Yes! One must respect both!” And then we shared an epic, resounding High Five. Here’s to connecting through good works!

That day we got to share our love of the environment and wildlife with the exact people we were hoping would use the bins and they more than met us halfway — not only did they share their love of nature and wildlife with us, they stepped up, pitched in, and dug a hole. A three-foot hole through the nastiest ROCK we have seen at any site.

That’s the way change happens, societally or environmentally, realizing you have a shared love in common — the natural world and being a part of it — and no matter the differences in your backgrounds, taking action together to protect it.

That’s the way Change Agents are born — kind of like a cosmic star nursery — they are born together, some a few hours or millennia older, some young and fresh off the star press. This entire saga of action has only been possible because of like-minded people coming together across divides to create a solution to a tragic problem.

This is all about people. We are stronger together. And the natural world needs us. Most desperately. Right now. So, be a Change Agent. I believe we can all be Change Agents. Large-scale or small. It doesn’t matter. Afterall, remember the Butterfly Effect? The phenomenon whereby a tiny local shift in a complex system can have massive effects beyond our knowing? Well, be a butterfly and send your change out into the world.

We have slightly fewer than half the bins left to install. If you are interested in helping us out with installs, or becoming a volunteer who collects the monofilament fishing line from the bins, email: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). If you’d like to see more bins get installed, donate here.