This is Bird Note.

Tim Arnold lives on Tybee Island off the Georgia coast near Savannah.

He's the founder and organizer of Tybee Clean Beach volunteers, organizing weekly

cleanups to keep the beach clean from trash and plastic pollution.

Making the beach more enjoyable for people to visit but more importantly safer for wildlife including his favorite bird the brown pelican.

They're just remarkable beasts.

They're awkward and prehistoric and elegant.

When you're sitting on the beach, all of a sudden you'll see this missile just dive from the air.

The way they pull their body together and the beak and tuck it in until they come back out again and you can see it and all the water flushes out.

When I see them dive like that, I do worry that they're coming up with some microplastic.

And it just sits in her belly and fills them up until they stop eating as much.

And literally started that.

And so, seeing the pelicans soar overhead during cleanup events reminds him of why this work is so important.

They love to hang out in the sandbars in the southern end of the island and then go north to roost.

We call it the pelican commute.

A couple hours before sunset usually you'll see them take off and they'll form this unbroken

line of pelicans flying north to Roosts.

When we're doing a beach cleanup,

and they go flying over here, everybody just stops.

So you can see everybody stops and looks up,

and it's great.

Learn more about the problems with plastics

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