CRUNCHY LUNCH

THE WHALES ARE BACK!!!! They are such magnificent creatures and I LOVE when they return to the islands. They go to Alaska all summer to eat, and then come back to Hawaii to have their babies in the winter. They must swim here very pregnant because they have only been back a month and there are already cute tiny fins following the huge fins. Today while I was watching them from the cliffs above Larsens there was one that began breaching over and over and simply didn't want to stop! NINETEEN TIMES! Usually they do one or two and stop. Breaching is when they jump out of the water and crash back down, sometimes their entire body coming out for a moment. These creatures weigh several TONS! Can you imagine what it takes to hurl several tons into the air above the water? It's like a house coming out of the water. Even more amazing is when you see it through binoculars as they seem to be jumping just 20 feet in front of you. Researchers have theories about why they do this but they don't really know. I think they do it because it is so much FUN! Maybe they want to pretend for a moment they are birds. That is some BIG bird!

After the show, which of course got a standing ovation, I went down to the sand to do my trash pick up and there is more than usual because of the big winter swells right now. As I was picking up small pieces of plastic literally every few inches, it occurred to me that this is now part of a whale's lunch. Even though they are the biggest creatures in the ocean, they eat one of the smallest creatures, krill. Think baby shrimp. Actually it's more like drinking lunch, but it's crunchy. They simply swim into a school of krill, open their mouths, and drink. Then the water gets filtered out and the rest gets swallowed. But the amount of plastic floating in the ocean now in among the krill is enormous. What have we done? Is this really what we want to give as our gift to these majestic creatures? Crunchy, toxic, plastic lunch.

So I ask every single one of you reading this to start picking up trash, especially plastic, wherever you are. And ask other people to help. We create so much garbage as a society, but it is not sequestered. Too much is just thrown loose in the streets, on sidewalks, hiking trails, beaches. Doesn't matter if you live in the middle of the continent. Every time it rains the water carries these garbage pieces to the storm drains, and the storm drains empty into rivers, which empty into the biggest storm drain of all, the oceans. And there it is. The candy wrapper from Idaho is in the stomach of some whale. Right now there are more people that throw trash than people that pick it up, which is why there is always trash laying around. Too many of us walk by it. There were 16 carloads of people down at the beach today and they ALL walked by it. Don't walk by it any more. The time for blaming is past. It's not "someone else's trash". It belongs to Humanity and we need to clean it up. We need to create more people picking up than throwing. Be one of those picking up, and think of the whale's lunch less that piece of trash you just got. Be the part of Humanity that DOES something about it.
Thanks for listening.