Field Guide to Cultural Significance & Avian Restor(y)ation Repository

Urban Bird Project’s Field Guide to Cultural Significance & Avian Restor(y)ation Repository are storehouses of bird stories that highlight the biocultural significance of borderlands birds. As a transdisciplinary and community-engaged effort, the field guide and repository refuse nature-culture distinctions and instead maintain the close connections between biological and cultural ways of knowing and being. We believe that highlighting the biocultural significance of borderlands birds and encouraging biocultural engagements can help us all celebrate and uplift usually marginalized relationships with our feathered friends. 

Organized as a collection of borderlands birds, the repository allows you to click on a bird and engage a storymap of emplaced bird stories. Because bird stories cannot be disconnected from the land and communities of their telling, each slide provides a map that locates each avian story within their social and material geographies. 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 field guide offers prompts for art and culture-led bird walks, the storymaps are filled with relevant sources for deeper and longer-term 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 difference. We also hope this field guide and repository will inspire you to tell new bird stories. Welcome.