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New Year’s Resolution: Hang Onto Those Balloons!

On New Year’s Day, people visiting Hammonasset Beach State Park found balloons. Dozens of balloons. They were stuck in the trees. They were all over the salt marshes. They were littering the beach, all of them posting a potential danger to birds, fish, turtles, and other wildlife. The plastic and mylar balloons can be mistaken for food, subjecting animals to a slow and painful death by starvation, and the ribbons can get wrapped around limbs, rendering them lame and useless, or strangle the animals, killing them quickly.

The balloons appear to have been part of a deliberate balloon release, perhaps as part of a celebration, says Kathy Herz, a wildlife biologist with the Connecticut Department of Energy & Environmental Protection. She says this kind of deliberate balloon release is more common around graduation time in the late spring and early summer, but that this is the first time she’s seen something on this level for New Year’s.

“That was kind of a new one,” she says.

Herz says state law prohibits the release of 10 or more helium or other similar balloons by anyone in a 24-hour period. But she adds that any release of balloons, whether accidental or intentional, in any number is potentially harmful to fish and other wildlife. She said it’s part of a larger problem of littering and pollution along state beaches and other waterways.

“I really think people don’t know any better,” she says. “Some of it is intentional. Some of it is accidental. You see people having memorials sometimes, or celebrations. I think a lot of people aren’t even aware that Connecticut has that law.”

When balloons go up, they generally land along the coast.

“They land along the water, because of the way the wind blows,” she says. “The popped balloons look like jellyfish, and [wildlife] tries to eat them. They can’t distinguish. It clogs up their stomachs and they starve. We found a few sea turtles dead, and we did some necropsies and their stomachs were full of plastic garbage. It happens with seabirds a lot, too. The other hazard, other than the plastic, is ribbon and string on the balloons.”

She said ospreys often decorate their nests with ribbons and strings.

“The ribbons can get wrapped around nestlings, and it can strangle them,” she says.

Carelessly discarded fishing line is a constant problem as well, she says.

“We have a photo of an adult osprey wrapped in fishing line, hanging from its nest,” she says. “People need to be careful of fishing trash, and any kind of trash, balloons, Chinese lanterns. What goes up must come down. It’s a danger to wildlife and the environment. It comes down as garbage.”

For more information about the dangers that balloons pose the environment, visit balloonsblow.org.