Stories To Save Us

eight birds:

MARGINS: Saltmarsh Sparrow

The 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 courses is under increasingly obvious, measurable threat, we continue to and build (and rebuild).

Coming 2026

Manifest Destiny and the invention of barbed wire fencing and the invention of the plow fundamentally altered the ecology of the Western plains in ways that reverberate today, both as ideology and practice. The Greater Prairie Chicken faces extinction due to fragmentation and homogenization of its habitat - even as this happens against a backdrop of the enduring myth of endless open space and possibility. 

Coming 2026

Pure human greed nearly put an end to the Whimbrel. Collective, bi-partisan laws like the Migratory Birds Treaty Act and preservation of key staging areas in their bi-hemispheric migration are powerful actions of reparation, protecting the multiple “pinch-points” where whimbrels face the most threat. However, with climate change and on-going hunting pressures, global co-operation is needed to ensure this species survival.

BASTION: Northern Gannet

Coming 2026

This once endangered bird thrives because of a remote, protected reserve. However, such “fortress conservation” is increasingly challenged by the ubiquity of climate change. Warming sees impact the fish stocks on which gannets – and commercial fisheries – depend, forcing us all to adopt new strategies.

Coming 2027

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.

Coming 2027

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

Coming 2027

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. Including Homo sapiens.

Coming 2027

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 terrible scientific omniscience how this exquisite wild, white bird vanishes into oblivion.