Human influence
The Great Pacific garbage patch isn't as great as it's name leads it to be. It is infact a terrible side effect of the wondrous material plastic. While plastic is a great material that is cheap to make and easy to use many people forget to recycle it or even to throw it out. In one way or another it finds its way to our waterways and eventually into our oceans. Once it is in the ocean it tends not leave, plastics will not decompose in a reasonable time like most biological products, so there they float until they are eaten by birds, fish, and turtles. The patch is spread out to about twice the size of Texas. There is a lot of plastic and trash there but you can not see the patch from space, the concentration of the plactic in this area of the ocean is not great enough to give an actual patch that you can see. But it is there, and it is around many islands that birds use to raise their young, the parents go out and bring back these colorful plastics and feed them to their children and the plastics kill the birds. Unfortunately this garbage patch is not the only one, there are patches like this in the Atlantic ocean and Indian ocean. We need to clean up our act, no pun intended, about half of the world's population relies on the ocean as their primary source of food. So if nothing is done we will eventually be like the birds and fish, feeding on the plastics that were only made to help us.
There are many birds and other animals that share the same fate as this bird. They die with bellies full of plastic, unable to get the foods they need.