Life with Dead Birds

Hi, all. It’s been a while.

I hope that you’re well. I hope that your loved ones’ are safe, and that you are getting through this time as best you can. None of this is easy.

I’ve seen so many statements going around the internet trying to rationalize the COVID-19 pandemic. People love to give reason to things. Slowly, voices have crept out to suggest that somehow, this virus is a healing, or that this is secretly good for what will remain of the human population. That we humans didn’t just cause this, but deserve it. The ones who suffer must deserve it.

I applaud the work that the scientific community has done to combat misinformation during this time. Let me join in: this pandemic is not a blessing, nor a solution. It is a tragedy, and the only thing that can lessen the harms caused by this tragedy is each other, all of us, treating each other kindly. We don’t need a reason why humans “deserve” this. Instead, we can find ways to lighten each other’s load during this crisis, especially considering that the load is landing most heavily on those with the least resources.

This is a really strange post to be writing.

I’ve been writing LwDB for just shy of four years now, and after hundreds of posts, endless species of birds, and many research tangents, I’ve reached an endpoint for the time being. This will be my final few weeks of Life with Dead Birds.

When I started writing LwDB, I had a few goals in mind. As I’ve reflected on this project, I think I’ve accomplished many of them.

1) Gain more experience in interpretive writing: I’ve gotten four years of experience right here! I’ve used this blog to help me reach freelance jobs, to write for channels and magazines and blogs that I really care about, and I’ve learned so much about what makes GOOD content.

2) Connect with interesting people: This blog gave me an excuse to talk with researchers, specimen skinners, scientific illustrators, birders, museum curators, photographers, and so many more incredible people. I got to meet my science communicator idol, Emily Graslie (hope you’re doing well, Emily!), and visit museum exhibits and collections spaces. I’m so grateful to all of these people for sharing their time and their resources with me.

3) Learn more about birds: I’ve always had a love for birds, but nothing has stoked that fire more than running this blog. This has been a fantastic excuse to read books, look through research, and learn from some of the best minds in ornithology, and I know now that the world is full of way more to discover than I can ever hope to understand. All the more reason to keep trying.

I have loved writing this blog and where it’s taken me, but it’s time to draw this to its natural conclusion. It’s only fitting, for a blog about death.

I never rule anything out, so there’s always a chance that I’ll be back someday, but for now, I find myself setting LwDB down so that I may focus more deeply on my amazing work as an environmental educator, naturalist, and interpreter. I’m also in the very beginning stages of some other interesting projects, so look out for those in the future! I’ll still post occasional updates on this site, especially for any future work I do that might be of interest to everyone here.

Finally, I want to say thank you to everyone reading this, especially for making it through this very long post. I’ve gotten to chat with a number of readers over the years, and it’s been so fun to hear about your bird stories and your hopes to work in museums and with animals, to share ideas and artwork, and to enjoy our love of everything ‘dead bird’ together.

To contact me in the future, feel free to drop a message here on Tumblr, I’ll still check the inbox. It’s been a pleasure.

Thanks for your patience with this one. I’ve been thinking on many of the conversations from last month’s “Interpreting Death” panel at the National Association for Interpretation’s National Conference, and I wanted to properly summarize the different points brought up by everyone involved.

Death is complicated.

After listening to perspectives from historical interpreters, park rangers, zookeepers, wildlife rehabilitators, researchers, and more, that’s the one thread that really pulls through. Some people are fascinated by death, while others are repulsed. People associate death with the macabre, with grief, with taboo and with love. It’s impossible to cater towards everyone when the topic of death comes up.

So for anyone attempting to cover something related to death in a creative or educational sphere, here’s a few brief guidelines that I work with in my writings.

1) Respect over all else. This means respecting the dead whose story you are telling, the people you are telling it to, and those who have tried to tell the story positively before you. Talking about death means you’re likely to push on uncomfortable issues for many folks, but keeping respect and empathy for others front and center will ease many mistakes. Don’t shy away from important details or images, but do allow for people to choose whether or not they see them. Admit unknowns and points of contention, but tell what you can in a meaningful way.

2) Allow the audience to mourn. Thinking on death can bring up feelings of grief for many, and allowing those feelings their place at the table brings depth to your work and RESPECT to your audience. I write about birds that have long since died, but I still try to include posts on the implications of these deaths, the good and the bad. Sometimes, people are upset. They are sad and angry, and those feelings often start from a place of love for animals. Acknowledging these feelings in others, and myself, re-humanizes museums, researchers, the audience, and myself, pulls us together in our mutual mourning for these birds, and allows us to continue learning together.

3) Share, even when it’s uncomfortable. Much of Western culture doesn’t like to focus on death. These leads to death becoming an almost fantastical concept, one that becomes more and more disconcerting to talk about, and one that many folks don’t honestly learn much about. I have plenty of children and adults in my classes who are so uncomfortable with the concept, they ask if we can find an alternative food source for nonreleaseable predators instead of dead animals. This is not to say they are unintelligent people, but they’re so horrified by the idea of death, they cannot look more closely at how one animal’s death keeps another alive. This often coincides with a disassociation from where the meat they may eat comes from, and what the meat actually is. These are complex moral issues, but they can’t be appreciated without deeper understanding. The best way to build that understanding in others and yourself is to share with each other. Share about your fears about death, your concerns for others, your ideas concerns deaths of people and other animals. More importantly, listen as others share with you. It’s often awkward, and not every interaction is perfect, but its important to have open discussions on the things that we can never perfectly understand.

Last weekend, at a party filled with family and friends, we celebrated the retirement of Janet Hinshaw, collections manager of the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology Bird Division. UMMZ staff past and present, researchers, artists, volunteers, birders, and more all gathered to tell stories about how Janet has shaped our favorite museum, and through it, the way we view our place in the natural world. We also had to find out where she’d be vacationing/birding first (California, to see her grandkids and some good birds).

Listen, I’ve got a lot to say, so I’ll put it under the “read more”. There’s a lot of feelings under there.

Hi everyone! Instead of a standard post this week, I’m attending the National Association for Interpretation’s National Conference in New Orleans!

I’ll be speaking on the “Interpreting Death” panel this Thursday at 2:30 pm, with eight other incredible interpreters who have found themselves spending a lot of time talking about the deceased. We’ll be discussing the “Interpreting Death” issue of Legacy magazine, our experiences working with the concept of death at nature centers, historical sites, museums, online, and beyond, and answering questions about one of the most universal (and universally complicated to talk about) subjects out there.

If any of you happen to be at the conference, I’d love to meet you! Please feel free to come up and say hello after the panel!

If you aren’t able to attend, I’ll also be spending some time post-panel synthesizing what we discussed. Either way, expect to hear more about dead stuff very soon.

At this time of year, some birds are coming to Michigan, and others are leaving. 

Sandhill Cranes (Grus canadensis) are migrating south to the warmth of Florida and Cuba. They’re easier to see than hear some days, with their yodeling calls keeping groups together.

Snowy Owls (Bubo scandiacus) have already moved into Canada and the northern United States for the winter. Snowies have already been spotted this year in Michigan, as well as New York, Massachusetts, Montana, and even as far south as Illinois.

Here’s to the beautiful change in seasons, and our bi-annual change in birds!

The UMMZ Bird Division shares lab space with the Mammal Division, leading to some tables being covered in warblers while others are covered in rodents.

The Eastern Chipmunks (Tamias striatus) and various mice found here are pinned down to dry. They’ve been prepped as study skins, with the bones and soft tissues removed and replaced by cotton, and now have to dry in the right shape before beginning their new lives in the mammal cabinetry, helping researchers all over the world to learn more about order Rodentia.

Mammal preparation shared a lot of commonalities with bird preparation. Specimens can easily be stored out of alcohol baths, and the outer coating of the specimen, fur or feather, don’t change over time quite as drastically as those of other animals.

I’m trying very hard to think of something interesting and educational to say about this specimen, but my brain keeps repeating “It’s a snake head! It’s a snake head in a jar! How cool is that?!”

So there you have it. This is an Emerald Tree Boa (Corallus caninus) head, in a jar. The head itself is only a few inches long, but this species of snake can grow to around 2 meters (6 feet) in length.

I don’t know where the rest of the snake is.

Museums are incredible places.

Great Walls of Fish, Batman!

Here we take a slight departure from dead birds, because this wall of dead fish is incredible. Some jars hold only one specimen, whereas others, like this jar full of Longfin Dace (Agosia chrysogaster) hold dozens.

With fish and other specimens that must be preserved in alcohol, it can be more effective to store many specimens in the same jar. However, those specimens must be the same species, collected at the same time and place to avoid any confusion down the line. In this case, the dace were all collected from the Aqua Fria River on December 3rd, 1943.

So many dace, same time, same place.

This Crested Caracara (Caracara cheriway) skull does not look nearly punk enough for its owner’s species.

Crested Caracaras are birds of prey, in the same family as falcons, and regularly eat snakes, lizards, and young alligators. Luke Dempsey, author of one of my favorite books on birding, nicknamed this caracara the “red-faced greater mullet bird,” which pretty much sums up both the bird’s aesthetic and how ironically cool it must look when scoping out prey atop a cactus.

Kirtland’s Warblers spend their summers here in Michigan, and as fall migration season kicks into gear, I’m looking at all of the amazing work that went into preserving their breeding grounds here in my home state.

Joselyn Van Tyne and so many other ornithologists spent years observing behaviors, collecting nests, and compiling information. What ends up looking like a bunch of brown-paper covered letters are actually the field notes and specimens that saved a species and defined a group of avian conservationists.

As new reports come from out from the IPCC, I encourage you all to look into the impacts our changing world may have on the wildlife that you love. Observe what’s going on, collect information from the resources available to you, and compile information on how you can push for real and meaningful change on all levels. When we all work together, we can stop the unthinkable.

Keeping your eggs safe? Well, it takes a village...weaver.

Village Weavers (Ploceus cucullatus) roost in large groups, and there may be dozens of nests all hanging from one tree. Having this many nests in one spot should make Village Weavers an easy target for cuckoos and other brood parasites who might try to disguise their own eggs as weaver eggs, and get away without having to put in much parenting effort. All the cuckoos have to do is make their own eggs look like weaver eggs.

Village weavers have evolved the perfect defense. Each weaver’s eggs look different! The eggs could be blue, white, speckled, spotted, dark, light, plain. No cuckoo can keep up with that, and if a Village Weaver spots an egg that just doesn’t match with the rest of the clutch, they know they’ve spotted an impostor.

All of these American Coot (Fulica americana) eggs came from the same nest! Must have been some busy parents of ten. While coots normally lay anywhere from eight to twelve eggs at a time, there’s a chance that something a bit underhanded lead to a nest of this size.

American coots are brood parasites, meaning that they’ll sometimes lay their eggs in someone else’s nest. While this might sound like a questionable parenting strategy, letting someone else raise a few chicks can make things much easier on a parent coot. Maybe some chicks will end up in an overcrowded nest, but others may now have access to more resources than they would have in their biological parents’ nest.

There’s still research being done on how much the ‘new parent’ coots can tell their eggs apart from the sudden newcomers, so if you want to get in on some real life drama, there’s a career path in ornithology waiting for you!

This beautifully-crafted net of grasses wasn’t made by sometime taking a break from knitting. It was made by a bird!

The Ploceidae family of weaverbirds contains dozens of species with an incredible talent for building gorgeous, sturdy nests. Some of these nests are small, but others like this one are longer than the average human arm. These elaborate nests hang down from tree branches, and their design helps to keep eggs and nestlings safe from predators.

Weaverbird males learn to tie many different knots using only their beaks and feet, with no thumbs to make it easy. It can take a lot of practice to get a nest just right, including making it near waterproof!

Specimen notes can really tell a story. The Palm Warblers (Setophaga palmarum) that created this nest managed to raise five young to fledging. Palm Warblers usually only lay four or five eggs in a nest, and having all of them survive as nestlings and get out on their own is great!