Vultures and plastic

In a reading program that we do called chapter chat, we have to complete activities. For one of mine I wrote a report about vultures. I then posted it on my blog. My whanau has been commenting loads on my blog and my mum commented on this post. She asked me if I could find out if vultures consume plastic and that is one of the reasons some species are very endangered. I found a website (http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.1676/14-107.1) that had some very important information. I took some information from that website:

Plastic material in the Diet of the Turkey Vulture in the Atacama Desert, Chile

 "Turkey Vultures are one of the most distributed feeders throughout the the Americas."  People that have investigated the Turkey Vultures diet have found that natural foods such as dogs, sea lions, and feathers showed in 17% of there diet. They also found that 78% of pellets from coastal sights and 83% of the pellets from inland sites contained plastic material. They supposed that plastic was probably ingested because vultures scavenge in plastic bags disposed as garbage along beaches and roads. The availability of food from garbage bags could partly explain the widespread distribution of these vultures in the desert. Turkey Vultures patrol roads in search of animals hit by vehicles, which results in finding carrion and garbage. Garbage in plastic bags has increased as more roads have been built in these areas. In the future, it will be important to study the effects of ingested plastics on these birds. I do not think that plastic is one of the reason that he Turkey Vulture is becoming extinct. One reason I found is they are poisoned by a toxic veterinary drug that is fed to livestock, then the vultures eat animals that have been drugged.