A bird’s-eye view of mass extinction

All through her lifetime, Block Island resident Elizabeth Dickens (1877­–1963) amassed a group of 172 stuffed birds—each time one died, locals would convey her the specimen—which she used to show the island’s youngsters about ecology. Her life and work inform “Taken from a Cat,” a solo exhibition by the Brooklyn-based artist Katherine Wolkoff that continues to be on view at Benrubi Gallery in New York by June 18, 2022. The present options forty pictures displaying Dickens’s handwritten labels recording how every fowl died, and 5 bigger panorama views of the island made with a lensless digital camera. Right here, Wolkoff discusses these works—an “index of loss of life”—that are additionally a sobering reminder that just about three billion birds have disappeared from North America since 1970. 

I GREW UP GOING TO BLOCK ISLAND as a result of my dad labored for the Nature Conservancy for over thirty years. I first realized of Elizabeth Dickens as a toddler when a nature protect was named in her honor there. In 2005, I noticed a poster about her on the Block Island ferry, and have become excited about photographing her fowl assortment. I used to be making silhouette portraits on the time, and it appeared a becoming option to {photograph} the gathering, because the silhouette is such an essential instrument in fowl identification. At the moment, I additionally photographed about six of the tags, which resided in my reminiscence.

Dickens, like every of the tags, has such an fascinating narrative. She lived on Block Island her complete life and was a self-taught ornithologist and citizen scientist. She lived in a distant space, by no means married, and watched the birds migrating by her turkey farm every season. Along with being an avid birdwatcher, Dickens was a loyal journal keeper. On February 1, 1913, she made her first entry: “Gannet 12, Canada Goose 10, Herring Gull 75, Track Sparrows 3, Meadowlark 5, Horned Lark 12.” She wrote each day entries for the following fifty years, itemizing each fowl she noticed. The journals chronicle her life and particulars of the pure world. “I stand on the bluff at Dickens Level at midday and look east, west, south and north with glasses and may’t see a drop of water, only one sheet of immobile ice,” she wrote in 1918.

The tags stand in for the precise birds and are hung in flock-like formations on the gallery wall. As I frolicked within the fields making the lengthy pinhole exposures, birds flew over me, however I used to be not capable of get them within the pictures. My incapacity to {photograph} them is one way or the other associated to their perilous existence. These birds are threatened in so some ways because of habitat destruction and local weather change. A lot of my earlier work can be about absence, the silhouettes of individuals and birds, in addition to deer beds—impressions left by sleeping deer in grass. As a result of the pinhole has no viewfinder, I couldn’t see what I used to be photographing, and this felt essential because the ensuing footage have been extra out-of-control and ephemeral. The publicity occasions have been additionally out of my management—six seconds for solar, twenty-six for an overcast day—and there was a variety of failure concerned. The ensuing photographs are chaotic, in movement, and have a determined feeling—precisely how I think about migrating birds really feel when touchdown on Block Island.

One among my favorites within the present is the American Egret’s story that reads, “Alighted on fishing vessel ‘Friars’ on George’s Financial institution throughout N.E. storm April 2, 1931. Delivered to Block Island by Capt Alfred Jacobsen who gave the specimen to Fabyan Allen who donated it to this assortment.” This can be a stunning fowl with fancy plumage, and I really like to consider the care it took to go this useless fowl from individual to individual so it may very well be included within the assortment. One way or the other the textual content jogs my memory of a sea shanty or The Rime of the Historical Mariner. There are a number of species within the assortment which are seldom seen in North America, just like the Northern Lapwing, who should have gotten caught in a large storm or misplaced, since they usually reside in Europe; in addition to the Magnificent Frigate fowl, whose typical vary is Florida to Ecuador. 

The horizon line within the {photograph} Snake Gap makes me take into consideration how the birds navigate 1000’s of miles utilizing the celebrities and their inside navigation to seek out their means. It’s nonetheless so stunning to me that these fragile creatures journey such lengthy distances. Birds largely migrate at evening, and I learn one thing about how over 1,000,000 go by the evening sky throughout migration, fully unseen by people. I prefer to suppose this cliff panorama is what they see within the nightfall as they depart from Block Island to proceed their journey. 

There’s a lengthy custom of land conservation and habitat safety on Block Island. Folks there who maintain jobs usually considered as incompatible with inexperienced politics—like dairy farmers, fisherman, and hunters—have been environmentalists for generations. I feel it’s partially the legacy of Dickens that made this potential. I’m drawn to the narrative of the place being a resting spot for birds, and the dramatic great thing about the cliffs, however the fields really feel like residence to me. I’m excited about the best way these tags, from over 100 years in the past, foreshadow the precipice on which we now sit. The tags will not be “about” local weather change per se, however the best way they’re an index of loss of life feels modern as so many species face extinction.

— As advised to Lauren O’Neill-Butler