On January 17, Brigitte Barthélémy was walking along the seashore just north of France's famous Bordeaux wine region when she stumbled upon a bottle nestled among a pile of seashells. Inside were two tightly rolled pieces of paper. One contained a beautiful hand-drawn sketch of a cormorant, while the other, was a message from the New York Pelagic outlining how litter caught in the ocean currents is often fatal for the water birds that mistake the bright plastic debris for food.