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Describe the Clear Your Gear program. It’s a collaborative that was born in 2014, when at CROW we noticed a 40% increase in the number of patients af- fected by monofilament over the two previous years. So I decided to get together with a number of other like- minded groups, and everyone thought it was a great idea. We were able to obtain a number of grants in 2015, and our program began. What is your mission? Our goal is to reduce as significantly as we can the amount of monofilament in the environment, because monofila- ment can last over 500 years. Doing so, we’ll have a better environment for fishermen and their crafts, and a safer en- vironment for people and for wildlife. What suffers the most from discarded monofilament? Primarily sea birds, sea turtles and fresh water turtles are the patients we see the most at CROW, most commonly for hook and line injuries. We see a lot of really horrible things where line has been left out or gotten hung up in trees, and birds get caught or turtles get tangled. How serious are the injuries? They can be serious or of course deadly, but when people bring an injured animal to us immediately upon injury or early in the injury, we stand a much better chance to help them survive. The last couple of years we’ve seen over a hundred injured or lost wildlife each year. What’s your best advice for safe fishing and preserving our wildlife? That’s easy. Be aware to not discard monofilament line into the environment. Don’t feed the wildlife ever. And just be mindful to keep the environment as clean as possible, and be a good neighbor to wildlife.
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