Heartbreaking Photo Shows Mother Bird Feeding Cigarette Butt To Chick

Walking along the beach, a Florida woman snapped a photo of a “devastating” sight — a mother bird feeding a cigarette butt to her baby.

The black skimmer probably mistook the cigarette for a small fish says photographer Karen “Catbird” Mason, who normally takes photos of the birds feeding their babies fish.

Karen decide to share the photos on Facebook, so people to better understand what could happen if they let their trash, including cigarette ends all over the places.

“If you smoke, please don’t leave your butts behind,” she wrote!

Cigarette butts were the most common type of trash collected from beaches around the world, according to a recent report by the Ocean Conservancy.

There’s a common misconception that cigarette butts are harmless, biodegradable bits of paper, when the filters are actually made of a type of plastic called cellulose acetate, that never fully biodegrades.

“The white fibers you see in a cigarette filter are NOT cotton, but a plastic that can persist in the environment as long as other forms of plastic,” say researchers at Longwood Universityin Virginia.

In addition to plastic pollution, the filters add hundreds of toxic chemicals to waterways.