Biocultural Field Guide & Avian Restor(y)ation Repository

Urban Bird Project’s Biocultural Field Guide & Avian Restor(y)ation Repository are storehouses of bird stories that highlight the cultural significance of borderlands birds. As a transdisciplinary and community-engaged effort, the field-guide and repository offer cultural ways of engaging with borderlands birds wherever you encounter them–on birdwalks, out in the field, in books/stories, or surfing the web. The main goal of these projects are to encourage cultural engagements with birds and to celebrate and uplift usually marginalized relationships with our feathered friends. 

Organized as a collection of birds, the repository allows you to click on a bird to find a storymap of emplaced bird stories. Because bird stories cannot be disconnected from the land and communities of their telling, each story provides a map that locates each avian story with their associated histories, sources, and community relationships. We believe bird stories take on the most meaning when they are embedded in place, in time, and told from specific local community members in local languages. However, outsiders also have much to learn from each story; specifically, we think borderlands bird stories carry forward valuable lessons of ecological relationality.

In the field guide and its associated repository, we hope you will engage with the many stories and many worlds that birds carry in their relationships with people. While the biocultural field guide offers prompts for art and culture-led birdwalks, the storymap repositories are filled with sources for deeper engagements. We hope you listen deeply to these prompts and stories. We hope they help all of us understand the ways birds connect humans across geographies of differences. We also hope this field guide and repository will inspire you to tell new bird stories. Welcome.