Heh. “Slotting”.
The explanation I have heard is that; by reason of their size and shape; plastic straws are surprisingly difficult to sort from the waste stream and end up in waterways in numbers that belie their relative volume. I don’t use enough straws to have researched the issue, it may or may not be true.
I’m pretty sure my straws go straight to landfill, in the stuff that isn’t sorted to speak of. 
Spotted Owls
How did we go this long without mentioned the single greatest job-destroying animal God, in His infinite wisdom, put on this planet: the Spotted Owl?
Now there were plenty of endangered animal controversies, but the Spotted Owl was definitely a Thing In Itself. Heard about it for years.
Piss Christ
Robert Mapplethorpe
Preschool pedophilia (1980s)
Bill Clinton: Draft Dodger!
Whitewater
Vince Foster
Lincoln Bedroom (Clinton letting donors sleep @ White House)
Marc Rich Pardon (2000)
The Spotted Owl being the only predator of the freshwater fish the Snail Darter.
I think I may have killed a spotted owl with my car back in the '80s.
50,000,000 jobs were saved by your sacrifice. Thank you.
You can substitute Bald Eagle for Spotted Owl. They taste almost the same.
Endangered species ‘turducken’? MMMmmm!
I didn’t read the whole thread, but your mention of birds reminds me of TFG’s (and his ilk) scare-mongering about windmills. Paraphrasing: “the cemetery of dead birds under a windmill!”
Blue whale> Sperm whale> Orca> Dolphin> Manatee> Baby beluga> Sardine garnish
You may joke, but it really did happen. I went to a very liberal college, right near the Olympic Peninsula where the whole spotted owl brouhaha took place. I was driving off campus one day, and a bird flew out of brush alongside the road and right in front of my car. I retrieved the body (it was an owl) and took it to a friend who collected animal specimens for study. He said it was a useful find because it was a juvenile and they weren’t sure if those were breeding in the area.
To this day I don’t know if it was a spotted owl, or if it made it into the college’s collection, but I like to think it’s there with my name on it.
And both taste kinda like Whooping Cranes.
Around here we like the sandhill variety of cranes. Plenty of them, just hit them with your pickup truck and take home the carcass. They taste almost like chicken.
In Alaska, fall is Sandhill Crane hunting season.
Around here every day is sandhill crane or deer season or the season of whatever your big-ass pick up truck decides to hit. It’s pretty much standard around here to have a big deer-catcher on the front of your truck, usually made of heavy-duty pipe, festooned with many extremely bright blue colored floodlights and CB antennae.
They seem to work, judging from the dead deer chunks littering the local roadsides. These fancy hood ornaments can spare you a bunch of auto body work when you hit a deer. Just pick out the smaller pieces of deer meat that are blocking your headlight beams and head on up to the nearest redneck bar up the road for another Bud Light.
Occasionally cranes damage rice field levees while burrowing for invertebrates, and local destruction of lettuce and other leaf crops can occur.
Well, it’s understandable then. That multi-billion dollar Alaskan lettuce crop must be protected.
Here’s a new one I saw last night. In response to the news of the Trump companies getting convicted during a secret trial, “Biden is turning America into Communist China/Soviet Russia!” Of course this ignores a couple of fun facts on why an organization would want a trial they’re subjected to being held in secret as opposed to open to the public.
… is the F/O the ‘secret trial’?