Oil spills, plastic ingestion, and fishing line entanglement drive seabird stranding crises globally.
Seabird welfare crises are largely invisible to the public — birds struggling at sea far from shore, slowly dying from plastic blockages, starvation from declining fish stocks, or drowning on longlines. The welfare impacts are immense in scale. Oil-contaminated birds that strand on beaches represent just a small fraction of affected individuals. Rehabilitation is intensive and expensive but provides welfare relief for individual birds while raising public awareness. Preventing stranding through addressing root causes — plastic pollution, bycatch, and climate-driven fish stock collapse — is the scale-up solution.