Death in the Eastern Garbage Patch

"Shed bird" was a Laysan Albatross chick on Kure Atoll, which, like hundreds of thousands of animals a year, died from plastics. Its entire proventriculus was filled with plastic... cigarette lighters, bottle caps, aerosol can pumps, shotgun shells, toys... more than 300 grams... enough to cover a 4 foot by 8 foot surface when all spread out. All of this was fed to the chick by its parents who, not recognizing what it was as it floated on the surface of the Pacific Ocean, scooped it up and regurgitated it on demand.

Shed bird was photographed by David Liitschwager, and appears with a collection of other remarkable photos of plants and animals of the Northwestern Hawaii Islands National Monument in Archipelago: Portraits of Life in the World's Most Remote Island Sanctuary, by David Liitschwager and Susan Middleton.

Archipelago reveals the wonders of remote Hawai'i, and illustrates in an odd sort of beautiful way, the ecological damage caused by refuse arriving on the ocean currents, even from thousands of miles away.