Cleanup at Seattle's Green Lake targets abandoned fishing lines that can ensnare wildlife

Abandoned fishing lines are the focus of a volunteer cleanup effort at Seattle’s Green Lake this weekend. The stray lines are blamed for killing two owls along the water’s edge in recent years.

Porter Good is a junior at Seattle’s Lincoln High School and one of the founders of its fishing club. He said Green Lake is a popular spot to fish, and cutting a line loose when it gets caught on branches is pretty common. But Good said when club members found out the danger this poses for wildlife, they wanted to help gather it up.

“Every time we’re out fishing and we see a line, we try our best to get it back,” he said. “But it’s really hard without having an organized cleanup with lots of people pointing out line, and having tools and equipment to remove it.”

The tools can include waders to grab lines from the water, and tree pruning equipment to get it out of the branches.

Wildlife advocates said they found three different owls tangled in fishing line at Green Lake over several months, two of which died while a third appeared to recover.

“I’d always seen [line] in the trees but it never occurred to me that a bird could get tangled in it until it initially happened,” Good said, adding that the fishing club stresses prevention by not casting lines near trees in the first place.

Good pointed out that the amount of abandoned fishing line is more acute at Green Lake than some larger lakes because “they stock it very heavily and it’s a small lake so it’s a lot easier to find good spots to fish.”

Wildlife advocate Kersti Muul said the owls have all gotten entangled in the lines during the winter months.

“When the leaves are gone, there’s a flight path through the branches, kind of like bird strikes with windows,” she said.

Muul added that she’s also helped animals entangled in fishing line at Alki Beach and Lincoln Park. If people find entangled animals, Muul said they can contact the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife or PAWS Wildlife Center for advice.

Such incidents prompted the community group Friends of Green Lake to start organizing the cleanups last year. Rob Zisette is the president of Friends of Green Lake and will use a boat to help with the cleanup Sunday. He said he first got involved in 1990 as the city’s lead limnologist in charge of cleaning up the lake. Now a volunteer, he’s also working on a project to restore the lake’s frog population.

Zisette said the cleanup events help raise public awareness, but “we can’t reach all the lines so we’re trying to reach out to [the Parks Department] to get some of the lines that are a little too high and out of our reach, and also to raise awareness to the fishermen themselves.”

Sandy Shettler is one of the volunteers with the cleanup effort. She said the impulse to organize it came out of a heightened awareness of nature as people saw the impacts on wildlife.

“There’s less of it, but we’re recognizing that we need it more to live full lives in the city,” she said.