It was a beautiful morning on Friday, February 6th as the Urban Bird Project Scholars for Spring 2026 assembled together for an art and culture-led bird walk along the San Pedro Creek Linear Park. Co-led by Urban Bird Project and local writer and poet, Marisol Cortez, the bird walk was specifically designed to think through ways of approaching biodiversity through transdisciplinary methods. Four stops along the creek served as “entry-points” into various methodological considerations: At Arrival and Welcome, Kenny Walker engaged the group in a series of openings that sought to layer methodological engagements with birds through scientific inquiry (quantitative methods of observations via ebrid), cultural significance (interpretive qualitative methods of the material and symbolic significance of birds), and environmental justice poetics (humanities arts-based engagement & embodied knowledge). The purpose of the layering was to disrupt our modern sense of space/time to reconsider interdependence as co-constitution (natureculture), how we “become with” in human-bird relationships, and how we can approach biodiversity through these blended knowledges and practices.
Local poet and writer, Dr. Marisol Cortez, read from her recently released book of poetry, The Bird Church (Fishing Line Press), which featured poems of the local grackles, monk parrots, and herons, often inspired by the birds in the very location we were walking. After Marisol read each poem, we discussed themes together and considered how the park and the birds served as a cultural road map for understanding the layers of diverse life in this place.
Kenny Walker and English PhD Candidate, Olarotimi Ogungbemi, shared pages from UBP’s field guide to biocultural significance, specifically discussing the egret/heron–its names, cultural significance, and biocultural importance as a bioindicator of habitat quality. Olarotimi shared a story from his storymap of the cattle egret, named lékèlékè in Yoruba, which he learned as a child growing up in Southwestern Nigeria. For the Yoruba people, the cattle egret carries layers of symbolic, spiritual, ecological, and linguistic meanings that demonstrate how the Yoruba understand interdependence among humans, animals, and the land. Olarotimi’s story also presented a spatial contrast of bird encounters since for him the bird was a transatlantic encounter, while for Marisol bird encounters embodied barrio ecologies and local San Antonio/Yanaguana cosmologies.
Thank you to Marisol, UBP leadership, and all our scholars for a morning of transdisciplinary ecological engagement along the urban waterways of San Antonio/Yanaguana.
