Toy Odyssey

What an Odyssey these 3 small toys have had. I picked them up far from the beach while we were counting albatross. The only way they could have gotten onto the island was in the gullet of an adult albatross coming into the colony to feed a chick. So, these 3 toys got into the ocean any number of ways: thrown off a ship, down a storm drain from a gutter in Asia, a washed out dump, you name the ways, but almost certainly from Asia.They then washed far out to sea where they were inadvertently eaten by an adult albatross on a feeding journey. They were then carried back to Midway and fed to a growing chick as part of a load of food. There are 2 possibilities at this point in the chain of events. The chick coughed up a bolus just before fledgling of all the inedible material it had been fed or the chick starved because its insides were completely filled with plastic and it could no longer be nourished. After death the chick decomposed and the plastic ended up on the ground far from the sea. These 3 small toys with a pen for size comparison, are part of several tons of plastic that end up in the albatross colonies on Midway each year.