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.

Living in the Age of Extinction: The Lost Bird Project

The Great Auk sculpture on Fogo Island , photo by The Lost Bird Project

We live in an age of extinction. According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), in the last 500 years, human activity is known to have forced 869 species to extinction. This is a rate that is 1000 to 10,000 times greater than the normal background extinction rate seen in the fossil record. 

Paul Ehrlich has compared biodiversity or species loss to popping the rivets from an airplane. We don’t know which rivet is going to make the entire airplane fall apart -- we don’t know how many species an ecosystem can lose before it collapses. Ecosystems perform services that humans depend on, from filtering water and air, to providing food, decomposing waste, sequestering carbon, protecting shoreline and so on. As the saying goes :biodiversity is life, it is our life. 

But what about individual species? What does the loss of an individual species mean to us? A marsupial is over-hunted in Australia. A toad disappears in Costa Rica. An ibex vanishes from the Pyrenees, a river dolphin from the Yangtze, a pigeon from the skies North America. Given that the present attitude is still for us to dominate nature and extract its resources for our personal welfare, we tend to ignore what we’re losing in the name of so-called progress. In each case, what we are losing is a survivor whose lineage withstood droughts, floods and competition from other, a work of art that is the product of millions of years of evolution species, a masterpiece of nature. This is an impoverishment of our world, a lost opportunity for us to wonder at something unique and beautiful.

There are books about extinct species, including the spectacular Gap in Nature, by Tim Flannery, with superb illustration by Peter Schouten. There is an online memorial to extinct species called What is Missing, by Maya Lin, which I mentioned before. And on May 22, 2011, a group of citizens in England created the Life Cairn, a memorial for species rendered extinct by human hands – they also created quite a moving video of the event. I like how they summarize the project: All life to carry one life and one life to carry all life.

Finally, in various places in North America, we now have some larger than life memorial sculptures to recently extinct birds, thanks to artist Todd McGrain and his Lost Bird Project. From their webpage, The Lost Bird Project “recognizes the tragedy of modern extinction by immortalizing North American birds that have been driven to extinction.”

Todd McGrain in his studio, photo by The Lost Bird Project

North America used to have the Passenger Pigeon, a bird that flew in flocks vast enough to eclipse the sun for hours or even days at a time; the Carolina Parakeet, a bird with striking green plumage and a yellow head that lit up winter trees like candles; the Labrador Duck, which was wiped out before anyone recorded the sound of its call; the Heath Hen, whose males boomed and pounded the Earth to attract mates; and the Great Auk, a seabird who was a swift and agile swimmer that mated for life. All of these birds, except the Labrador Duck, were hunted to extinction. The cause of the extinction of the Labrador Duck is unknown: its eggs may have been over-harvested or the cause may be related to the decline of shellfish as population grew along the Eastern seaboard.

McGrain has spent the last few years creating bronze sculptures for each of these birds and they’ve been installed in places directly related to each bird’s decline. The bronze, of course, means they were created to last, but also to be touched. He describes them as “subtle, hopeful reminders…As a group they are melancholy, yet affirming. They compel us to recognize the finality of our loss, they ask us not to forget, and they remind us of our duty to prevent further extinction."

Labrador Duck, photo by The Lost
Bird Project

On the tree of life, the branches of the Passenger Pigeon and Carolina Parakeet have been cut. In the biosphere, there are now holes shaped like the Great Auk and Heath Hen. In all our technology, there's not a single recording of the call of the Labrador Duck. In a sense, it would have been more appropriate to have installed the moulds at the locations rather than the sculptures so that we could contemplate the shadows that these birds have cast upon us. Perhaps that's too negative a message for public art? Instead they are solid, smooth, tactile, reverent.

I think it’s an ambitious and enormously important project. Not only because, as McGrain says, “forgetting is also a kind of extinction” and these memorials rescue them to our memory, but also because we as a species need to be reminded of the enormous influence we wield on the world around us. The memorials need to be visited and discussed, the stories of these birds needs to be told and shared. These birds still have much to teach us about how we live and the repercussions of our actions.

It's bewildering to think that the formerly enormous populations of these birds were each wiped out in a matter of decades, due, in four of five cases, to over-hunting. In writing about the demise of the Passenger Pigeon, Aldo Leopold wrote, "For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun." This is the age of extinction. McGrain, like Leopold, correctly noted that we need a place to properly channel our grief for these lost species. These memorials are new things under the sun and their message is important -- if we're willing to hear it.

You can find out more about The Lost Bird Project by taking in the documentary, directed by Deborah Dickson, whose trailer is below. 

Sea of Slaughter

I've been reading about extinct species, the sorry tale of how the last of the species fared. Martha, the last passenger pigeon, died in the Cinncinnati zoo, the last Rabb's fringe-limbed tree frog stilll lives in the Atlanta zoo. Conservation efforts for all of these were too little too late. The last great auks met a much more harsh ending: beaten and strangled. In one case, superstitious sailors thought one was a witch. Oh, but we're smarter now, aren't we? Looking around the world and hearing about poaching of rhinos for their horns, or elephants for theirs tusks, or sharks for their fins, I'm not so sure. We would never hack a thoroughbred to death, but that's how bluefin tuna, the thoroughbreds of the sea, meet their death.

We evolved from the same tree of life as the rest of the species that inhabit the planet and yet we treat all of nature as a commodity. In Carmel Point, Robinson Jeffers writes:

We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;

We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident

As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

I wonder what the planet would look like if we shifted our focus away from ourselves, "uncentered our minds"? 

In 1994, Canadian writer Farley Mowat published, Sea of Slaughter, a history of human exploits in the north Atlantic seabord. It's an incredible tale of devastation and destruction that alas, does not end 150 years ago with the demise of magnificent birds like the great auk or even 100 years ago with the death of the last passenger pigeon. Mowat pulls no punches in his description of carnage and a film version, made for the CBC, contains incredible footage of thriving rookery islands and also bloodbaths of humans destroying animals. Perhaps we need this honest look at ourselves more often before we're ever going to change our relationship with animals.