Living in an age of extinction IV: an interview with Todd McGrain of the Lost Bird Project

Todd McGrain in his studio. Photo credit: The Lost Bird Project

Todd McGrain is an artist formerly on the faculty of Cornell University. Ten years ago he began creating sculptures of recently extinct birds of North America and placing them where the birds last thrived. Now called “The Lost BirdProject” (previously discussed here), Todd and his efforts are the subject of a new film (reviewed earlier this week – see it!). Recently, Todd kindly answered some questions I sent him over email.

Daniel Hudon. You’ve been working on the Lost Bird Project for the past ten years. How do you think it fits into your previous body of work?

Todd McGrain: I have always been drawn to natural forms and the way natural forms are held in a persistent state of flux.  Through erosion, accretion, growth and decay, natural forms are embedded with the markings of time.  The expression of this flow of time has long been the narrative in my work.  The Lost Bird Memorials are more literally representational than my previous work, and consequently, they have more specific narratives behind them.  Their forms, however, remain connected to my ambition to embody the effects of time in material form.

Memories, like beach stones, are softened and honed by the persistence of time.

Daniel In the film, The Lost Bird Project, we’re shown that your inspiration was from reading Hope is the Thing with Feathers, by Christopher Cokinos. What was it about the book that inspired you?

Todd: Most importantly, it was from this wonderful book that I was first introduced to some of these birds.  While I was familiar with the Passenger Pigeon, the Labrador Duck was completely unknown to me.  I was struck by the fact that the last of this species perished quite close to my childhood home.

I was also moved by Chris’s effort to balance his interest in natural history and extinction stories with his own personal challenge of dealing with the tragedy of extinction.  Reading the book, I felt as though I had been invited along on this exploration of history and heart.

Andy Stern, Todd McGrain and a helpful ranger scouting
Photo credit: The Lost Bird Project

Daniel:  In his book, Cokinos travels around the Eastern US and the Maritimes of Canada investigating the histories of several famous – and unknown – extinct birds including the Passenger Pigeon, Heath Hen, Labrador Duck, Great Auk, and Carolina Parakeet, which became the subject of your memorials. You must have had to do the same to investigate where to put your memorials? According to the film, not everyone wants a sculpture as a gift – were you surprised by that?

Todd: The trips we made to find the most appropriate sites to place the memorials were true adventures.  We found places that felt haunted by the loss of the birds and at the same time met remarkable people doing incredible habitat restoration, historical preservation and ecology.  It was an inspiring period.

The challenges I faced in negotiating the placement of the memorials were amplified by my ineptitude and inexperience as a promoter.  As I became more committed to the project, more experienced in expressing my conviction, doors began to open.

Much of the resistance we encountered in negotiating the placement of the sculptures was based on legitimate concerns.  We do have to be careful about what we place in our parks and preserves.  Extinction is a difficult topic.  It is a subtle balance to keep the memory of the birds alive without casting blame and the paralysis that can stem from denial or even sorrow.  I can understand how accepting theses gifts would require consideration and thoughtful measure.  My sympathy for these issues may have led me to soften my initial pitch.  In the end, I was convinced that the memorials addressed these issues, in part, because of how well they were received in the communities that were quick to accept them.  I came to truly believe in the value of the work.

Daniel: All the memorials are in bronze – how long should a bronze sculpture last?

Todd: Despite all our advances in material technology, bronze remains one of the most durable materials.  Though forever is a long time, I believe it is fair to say that as long as these memorials are not intentionally destroyed they will remain.

Daniel: What was it like getting to know these extinct birds as you sculpted them? Did you feel any affinities for some more than others?

Todd: I fell in love with each of them in turn. Each bird is unique with a particular natural history and a compelling extinction story.  Though each had a different geographical range they now coexist in the shared habitat of our imagination and memory.

Daniel: There’s a great quote on your site and in the film by Aldo Leopold: “They cannot dive out of a cloud, nor clap their wings in thunderous applause. They know no urge of seasons; they feel no kiss of sun, no lash of wind and weather, they live forever by not living at all.” Elsewhere Leopold writes about grieving for species that we’ve lost, like the Passenger Pigeon. It seems we’ve not only not grieved about their loss, we’ve forgotten about them, something your memorials are trying to address. Could you talk about this idea of grief versus forgetting?

Todd: While forgetting may seem to have a therapeutic value, in the end we are not rewarded for our forgetfulness.  Our bodies carry the burden of loss with or without our recognition of the cause.  Our nameless sorrows continue to weigh us down.  There is, in the end, an unavoidable callousness in forgetting.

Grieving can be productive.  There are lessons to be learned from our feelings of loss.

The experience of grieving can bring focus to the value of what remains.  Collective grieving, our shared compassions hold us together.

Daniel: What do you say to people who ask what extinct species have to tell us?

Todd: Extinct species tell us to pay attention.

Daniel:  Related… Endangered Species Day seems to be confined to zoos and botanical gardens. What do you think it will take to get the problem of species going extinct into the mainstream?

Todd: I think the plight of endangered animals is gaining recognition.  More and more people are aware of the challenges animals are facing but understanding and pursuing the best way forward remains a daunting challenge.  A lone polar bear on an iceberg is heart breaking, but if we don’t understand our role in climate change we will simply be stymied by sorrow.  Education in all forms must address finding and communicating solutions.

Daniel: What sort of response have you had to the memorials?

Installation of the Heath Hen, Martha's Vineyard
Photo: The Lost Bird Project

Todd: In general, the response to the sculptures has been positive.  It was reported that the Heath Hen Memorial on the riding path on Martha’s Vineyard spooked a few horse but there is no way to satisfy all critics.

Daniel: On Fogo Island, Newfoundland, the memorial of the Great Auk looks out onto the vast Atlantic from a rocky scrap of land, surveying its former domain alone. As a tribute and memorial, it’s incredibly elegant. But to think of the thousands of Great Auks that once shared that view is sad to the point of heartbreaking. In fact, the film achieves a fine balance of being a sort of light-hearted road movie where we visit places where the birds once thrived and then suddenly the significance of the memorial hits home. Did you make conscious decisions about the sort of tone you wanted ahead of time or did it just evolve?

Todd: The filmmakers Deborah Dickson, Muffie Meyer, Scott Anger and Roger Phenix get full credit for the expressive force of the film.  They collected over one hundred hours of footage to make this one-hour documentary.  We did discuss early on that the film could not be so depressing that no one would want to sit through it, but ultimately it was the filmmakers who found the balance.  One aspect of the project that added significantly to the levity of the film is the fact that my brother-in-law and companion on the project, Andrew Stern, is a truly hilarious person.  His mix of intellect and wit offered countless moments of levity.  The original score by Christopher Tin also plays a central role in the emotional force of the film.  

Daniel: How do you think the project has changed you?

Todd: I find myself reading more, writing more and speaking in public much more.  My sculpture work remains a rather solitary act, but as the project has broadened I have come to understand the necessity of engaging the topic of extinction in as many ways as possible.  I remain a sculptor and cherish the time I spend in the studio.  However, I know I will remain more socially and publicly engaged than I was before these lost birds called me out.

The Carolina Parakeet in Kissimmee, FL
Photo: The Lost Bird Project

Daniel: What’s next for the Lost Bird Project?

Todd: I’m working on a memorial to the Eskimo Curlew.  I’m also working on collaborations with groups that are looking for creative ways to communicate the urgency of our ecological crisis and to help publicize the ongoing efforts to mitigate its impact.

Daniel: I see the film is getting screenings at festivals. Any chance of it getting released?

Todd: I hope so.  We are working on it!

Readers can keep up to date with The Lost Bird Project by finding them on Facebook and, appropriately, by following their tweets on Twitter. 

Living in an age of extinction III: The Lost Bird Project Film Review

Quick, how many extinct birds of North America can you name?

Most of us could probably name the Passenger Pigeon, famous for flocking across the sky so thickly that they would eclipse the sun, and the Great Auk, a flightless bird in the puffin family that once thrived in the North Atlantic. Beyond those two, few of us would know about the Heath Hen, the Labrador Duck or the Carolina Parakeet, three other birds that have gone extinct in modern times. “Forgetting is another kind of extinction,” says Todd McGrain, the artist whose work is profiled in The Lost Bird Project, a fascinating documentary film and project that aims to rescue the birds from cultural extinction.

According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN)

since the year 1500, human activity is known to have forced 869 species to extinction. In his excellent book, Hope is the Thing with Feathers, Christopher Cokinos frames it for us for the future: “within the span of my life up to one-fifth of species will be gone,” an extinction rate that is more than 1000 times the normal rate.

            Inspired by Cokinos’ book, The Lost Bird Project (also discussed in this post), directed by Deborah Dickson, is a light-hearted film about a serious subject: how can we memorialize extinct species? McGrain’s answer, and an answer that is long, long overdue, has been to create larger-than-life bronze sculptures of these five birds and install them in places significant to where the birds last thrived. “We can’t allow these extinctions to be thought of as a natural process,” McGrain says. “Memorializing them helps keep their memory alive.”

Todd McGrain with his sculpture of the Passenger Pigeon
Photo: The Lost Bird Project

            In the film, McGrain, and his brother-in-law Andy Stern, go on a wild goose chase around the Eastern US and Canada to properly situate the memorials. The film opens with a large crate being brought by helicopter to barren and rocky Fogo Island, Newfoundland. Inside the crate, we find out in the next scene as McGrain puts his hands into buckets of clay and begins forming shapes, is the story of the five extinct birds, a mix of the known and unknown, lost to biology and now on the verge of being lost to history.  

It is the compelling nature of these birds’ stories as much as the effort to situate the memorials that drives the film. The Heath Hen is portrayed as a dancer, a singer, and a fighter. Footage of the closely related prairie chicken’s elaborate courtship display shows males booming and thrusting out their chests to win the attentions of the females. Though they once thrived on the coast from Maine to Virginia, by 1870, overexploitation had wiped out the coastal population leaving only a few hundred survivors on Martha’s Vineyard. The state of Massachusetts did enact measures to save the population, but numbers continued to dwindle. By 1929, there was just one left, famously known as Booming Ben and he was once seen calling out repeatedly from the top of a tree. No answer came.

McGrain quotes a Samuel Beckett line that most writers and artists know, “Fail better,” and this becomes the subtext for the film and the entire Lost Bird Project. McGrain’s first pitch for a memorial to the Heath Hen in a state park on Martha’s Vineyard is turned down. Stunned by the denial, he resolves to “fail better” in order to appropriately honor the bird. Evidently, this involves much behind the scenes courting of bureaucrats and this story is teased out over the course of the film. The sculpture is not some random memorial, instead it is “something that digs deeply and will add meaning to the place.” Having already seen the care that goes into making the sculptures, and been shown the Heath Hen’s remarkable story, we’re already onboard and rooting for McGrain to succeed. 

Labrador Duck
Photo: The Lost Bird Project

On the road, McGrain and Stern track down bird enthusiasts and conservation biologists who might know anything about these lost birds. One of the tragedies exposed in the film is that we only see the Carolina Parakeet, a striking bird with brilliant green plumage and North America’s only parrot, in a drawer instead of chattering among the trees in one of its homes near Kissimmee, Florida. The demise of the Passenger Pigeon, described as a biological storm, is linked to the new rail transport, which could transport millions of hunted birds across states in a day or two, where they could be sold at market. The Labrador Duck -- presented in McGrain’s memorial as a form that elegantly folds back in on itself -- gets little screen time, because little is known about it, a victim of industrialization and habitat loss. Indeed, we barely know how much we’ve lost and the film evokes a sense of a former glory of sound and color in the thickets, among tree tops and along the coasts.

With an upbeat, eclectic score provided by Grammy-award-winning composer Christopher Tin, and Stern's comic relief to McGrain's dedicated mission, the tone of the film tightropes between quirky road trip and a deeper elegy.  As the two men successfully negotiate the installation of the memorials, the stories all gather strength so that by the time we visit Fogo Island, Newfoundland, to hear the tale of the Great Auk, with its “Chaplin-like appeal,” the film takes on real gravity. The indigenous people of Newfoundland buried their dead with Great Auk beaks and these spectacular sea birds allowed the survival of the first settlers – just as Fogo Island itself was a refuge for the birds to come ashore and lay their eggs. Ungainly on land, they were easy to kill and were hunted for their down. But before we start thinking this is all history of a century ago and that we know better now, a Newfoundland woman reminds us of how the same market forces that decimated the Great Auk also decimated the cod and drove it to the brink of oblivion.

            At the unveiling of the Great Auk, locals clamber over barren rocks for the christening ceremony. Like the other memorials, the Great Auk sculpture is big enough to make a statement, with smooth curves that long to be touched, for touch, McGrain says, “is literally how we come in contact with the world.” After ceremonial flares are lit, a few people line up to kiss its beak. One gets the sense that at last, the Great Auk has come home. 

           The importance of the film, now making the rounds at film festivals but deserving of a much wider audience, is not just to honor these lost birds but to help us to understand these birds better, to grieve for their loss by “opening a portal into learning their stories”. Forgetting is a kind of extinction. Ultimately, the Lost Bird Project is a hopeful film. The memorials are triumphs of personal perseverance and totems for our cultural memory. Now there are five places in North America where people who knew nothing about these lost birds can delve into their stories. By learning their stories perhaps we can indeed fail better and turn these past failures into future successes. 

Stay tuned for an interview with Todd McGrain, coming soon.
More information about The Lost Bird Project, including a film-trailer, can be found at their website.