Urban Bird Project’s Avian Restor(y)ation Digital Repository is a storehouse of borderlands bird stories from elsewhere and otherwise. As a transdisciplinary and community-engaged effort, this repository offers a more diverse and more accurate collection of multispecies encounters that celebrate and uplift usually marginalized avian worlds.
Organized as a collection of birds, click on each bird (item) to find a storymap of emplaced bird stories. Because bird stories cannot be disconnected from the time/space, land, and communities of their telling, each story provides a map that deeply contextualizes each avian story with their associated histories, geographies, 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 intergenerational routes of relationality.
In this repository, we hope you will engage with the many stories and many worlds that specific birds carry in their relationships with people. We hope you listen deeply to these stories. We hope these stories help us understand the ways birds connect humans across geographies of differences. We hope you learn and tell these stories ethically in your own contexts, perhaps when leading birdwalks. We also hope this repository will inspire you to tell new bird stories. Welcome.
*Collection Note: Each bird story collected here has either been previously published or approved to be stored here by the storyteller and/or storytelling community. Not all birdstories should be shared publicly; so some birdstories will not be collected here. However, if you are interested in sharing a birdstory with urban bird project, please email us at urbanbirdproject@gmail.com
*Cover Image Note: Milo Colton, of Cherokee and Scottish heritage, is a lawyer, professor emeritus, and elder in the San Antonio community. As a regular contributor to the Urban Bird Project, we honor Milo for his unyielding work on tribal law in Texas and for sharing his wisdom with us.
*The Avian Restor(y)ation Digital Repository is one part of the UBP Digital Repository, co-directed by Carolina Hinojosa and Kenny Walker with team members Eres Gomez, Amelia King-Kostelac, and Olarotimi Ogungbemi.
Click on an image below for borderlands bird stories:
