As Birdwings Artist Statement
As Birdwings explores the devastating impacts of climate change on birds. The bird population in North America has decreased by 2.9 billion since the 1970s.
North Carolina shorebirds are experiencing habitat loss with rising sea levels from climate change. This series focuses on Black Skimmers that migrate from Central and South America to Wrightsville Beach during the spring to mate and raise their young. Black Skimmers make their nests as scrapes in the sand near the shoreline. As beaches erode, these birds have less area on which to build nests. Audubon predicts that the Black Skimmer’s climatic range will decline by nearly two-thirds in the winter and by more than five-sixths in summer.
The habitat and the life of the Black Skimmer, and in fact, the lives of all beings and places, is precious and as fragile as birdwings.
This series was inspired by my years of serving as a volunteer for North Carolina Audubon’s Wrightsville Beach Bird Steward program. I have spent a number of years observing these birds as they arrive in spring, choose a mate, create a scrape in the sand, lay their eggs, raise and feed their young, fend off predators, teach their young to fly and fish, and then migrate back in fall. Each year, it has been an awe-inspiring experience for which I am eternally grateful.
The title of this series was inspired by lines from a poem by Rumi:
Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror
up to where you are bravely working.
Expecting the worst, you look, and instead,
here’s the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see.
Your hand opens and closes, and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you would be paralyzed.
Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding,
the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
as birdwings.
– Rumi