Dwindle

As a young girl, I became enamored of the birds in our small inner-city backyard. Their bright colors, easy freedom and sonorous melodies in an otherwise dreary and impoverished urban environment appealed to my artistic side; the ability to “collect” and quantify sightings of a surprisingly large number of urban species appealed to my logical, scientific side.

Dwindle utilizes both ways of knowing by creating a visual comparison of scientific meta-data of bird populations from 1966–74 and 2016–2018. I researched past and current population data for 16 (mostly common) species representing all regions of the United States, creating two bird-laden maps visualize the populations of those species then and now. Each bird represents 500,000 birds; the current map contains just 38% of the total number of birds found in the historic map. Some populations have plummeted more than 95% –this should sound the alarm bells!