Plastic waste has let common coots reuse nests year after year. Scientists have now used the trash layers to date how old nests are.

"The oldest layer is as old as me — all my life, a bird was nesting here," said Auke-Florian Hiemstra, a biologist at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, Netherlands. Unlike natural nests ...

In Amsterdam, birds are increasingly using materials available in the urban environment, including plastic packaging.

Coots' nests in Amsterdam are built using discarded plastic, providing a time capsule into the material's use over the past ...

In fact, this has already begun: Researchers revealed the history of bird nests in The Netherlands by scrutinizing plastic litter used in the nests’ construction. Many different birds ...

Australian researchers link plastic consumption to organ failure in seabird chicks and say more detailed studies about the impact of plastics on the natural world are needed.

Since plastic never truly disappears, every bit of old nesting material remains as the birds stack new layers of material, one breeding season after another. Scientists have previously used ...

Here's NPR's Jonathan Lambert. JONATHAN LAMBERT, BYLINE: The main way biologist Alix de Jersey tells how much plastic a baby seabird has eaten is by feeling its stomach. ALIX DE JERSEY: When birds are ...

JONATHAN LAMBERT, BYLINE: The main way biologist Alix de Jersey tells how much plastic a baby seabird has eaten is by feeling its stomach. ALIX DE JERSEY: When birds are really highly plastic ...