Cute and cuddly but with a really powerful story to tell - that’s Fred the Monkey, who is spending time with MCS to help highlight the problem of beach litter.
Fred began life in Marrowstone Island , Washington State, USA. His owner, Ron Hirschi, a fisheries biologist , was shocked by the story of how albatross chicks were dying because their parents were feeding them plastic pieces that they had mistaken for squid and other fish.
Ron decided Fred should highlight the plight of the albatross and the dangers of marine litter generally, by going on a world wide journey to highlight the issue.
Fred wears an albatross’s leg band around his neck. X310 was a Laysan Albatross, born in March 2008 and lived on Pihemanu, in the Hawaiian archipelago - one of the most remote atolls on earth.
X310 died in June 2008. Her parents flew thousands and thousands of miles finding food for her, but the sea throws up new challenges in food finding because of the increase in marine litter. Babies like X310 die because they eat so much plastic, they can’t get it out of their stomachs and starve.
Fred’s journey took him to Ohio where he worked with children there on a river clean. He travelled to Haiti and Rhode Island, before jetting off to England to meet with Maya Plas from ‘Learn to Sea’. Fred helped Maya and her friends clean the Avon estuary near Kingsbridge in South Devon, where they found plenty of plastic litter, like beer can yokes which are a real danger to birds who get tangled in them.
Fred’ s next stop was Blackawton Primary School, where he explained about the problems of plastic litter. The Children were given locally made bars of soap to cut down on plastic dispensers. Fred also called in at the Living Coasts sanctuary in Torquay and fed the penguins! He then met with youngsters from Sherwell Primary School, who all wrote poems about pollution and why it should stop.
Fred then joined in a beach clean at Bantham Beach in Devon led by the local branch of MCS. They collected over 6 bags of rubbish as well as some much larger pieces of beach litter. The group took away a polystyrene board that, if left, would have broken down into tiny little bits and got eaten by birds and other wildlife.
Fred arrived at MCS headquarters in Ross-on-Wye on March 20th 2010, and went straight out on a beach clean at Weston-super-Mare in Somerset. Fred and volunteers from the University of the West of England filled 25 bags with beach litter.
Fred is now heading off to Mexico with Emma Snowden, Litter Projects co-ordinator at MCS, to take part in a global conference on coastal clean ups. He’ll be helping Emma with her daily blog.
