Birds of America

This once endangered bird thrives because of a remote, protected reserve; yet such “fortress conservation” is increasingly challenged by the ubiquity of climate change.

The Greater Prairie Chicken’s predicted functional extinction is a direct result of the on-going, wholesale destruction of Western landscapes – and our preference for its romantic mythology.

The tidying of nature, as a practice and ideology rooted in the development of our post-War suburbs, has resulted in pathological, national “lawnification” now endangering species like the Whip-poor-will that prefer “messy” habitat.

Pure human greed nearly put an end to the Whimbrel; collective, bi-partisan laws like the Migratory Bird Act and preservation of key migratory staging areas are powerful acts of reparation that ensure their present persistence.

The plain Saltmarsh Sparrow is a canary in the coal mine of climate change: the steady rise in sea-water level is drowning young chicks and pushing the species towards extinction. Even as our own “coastal habitat” of condos and golf course is under increasingly obvious, measurable threat, we continue to and build (and rebuild).

300 years ago the Cahow, or Bermuda Petrel,  was believed exterminated by Spanish settlers in the Caribbean. Then, in 1951, 8 pairs were found on rocky Bermudan outcrop by a local boy. Seabirds are particularly elusive to us: albatrosses, shearwaters, terns represent the sublime and ineffable.

We laud the success of the Peregrine Falcon in adapting to cityscapes but ignore the millions of migrating songbirds dying in window strikes. Environmental changes are now occurring so quickly that most species’ adaptions – developed over deep time - cannot possibly keep up.

Living in complete isolation from humans, this elusive Arctic traveler has been neither adequately filmed nor studied and is bound to the same fate of starvation as the polar bear. As the pack ice melts, we watch, with the terrible scientific omniscience, this exquisite, wild white bird vanish into oblivion.

Fire blasts through a western forest. Houses explode into flame. What is our adaptive response to this? Do we rebuild in the same place? Or do we shape a new Manifest Destiny for all the gorgeous, complex life entangled in this same net of time and place?