Great Lakes communities celebrate and conserve bird migration as a vital part of the region’s unique maritime culture.
Vision
The Problem
Each year, billions of birds migrate through the Great Lakes region where critical stopover and airspace habitats intersect densely populated coastal areas. From habitat loss and predation by house cats to collisions with windows, communication towers, and wind turbines, this convergence creates critical risks for migrating birds. Despite growing scientific understanding of these threats and the availability of simple, cost-effective ways to help birds, public awareness remains limited, and protective actions have been slow to gain traction.
A Solution
Well told stories have power to cultivate value change and inspire collective action. The journey and survival of migratory birds in the Great Lakes region is a tale of immense beauty and resilience wanting to be told in new and incisive ways. Captain Perkins is the mid-century hero waiting to tell it. The captain’s passion, and ours, is to bring long-distance bird migration to life and inspire collective action to protect this phenomenon as a unique source of identity throughout the Great Lakes basin.
Image: Erik Bruhnke
Image: J. P. Perkins
Image: Janelle Cole
Why Now?
Since 1970, one in four birds have disappeared, most of them migratory. Simple, scalable actions can help stop this decline. Captain Perkins is a hero for our times. His story and the Great Lakes bird migration offer unparallelled stories of discovery and inspiration that have the power to connect people across geographies and cultures and motivate collective action.
Timeline and Deliverables
Project Prospectus - Coming soon
Project Goals
Connect. Cultivate a rich human-interest story to connect people with nature through the beauty and complexity of migrating birds.
Imagine. Develop film, art, curricular, and multi-media resources to bring to life a natural phenomenon that passes over us while we sleep but is notoriously hard to see.
Amplify Actions. Promote awareness of and safe travel for migrating birds by amplifying the actions partners are taking to build bird friendly communities.
Reduce Mortality. Foster implementation of proven practices that mitigate human-caused mortality at critical periods of migratory birds’ life cycles.
Support Conservation. Pair the captain’s data and observations with 21st century techniques to address today’s scientific questions and conservation outcomes.
Promote Tool Development. Support mapping patterns of Great Lakes migratory bird movements in space and time to directly inform management needs and actions.