Transcending Boundaries With Wings
By Katelyn Lipton
May 6, 2021
Birds transcend boundaries with their wings. The birds I depict are examples of migratory species that travel from the northeast of North America to Central and South America. Birds migrate based on necessity, crossing countless state and national border lines in search of a warmer climate with a bountiful food supply. However, these borders become barriers when applying migration to a human context. The border lines that birds cross instinctively and unknowingly become physical barriers for people, who become legal or illegal immigrants based on paperwork.d Some get sent back home. Others are arrested, detained, and treated as criminals when they are simply trying to search for a better living situation, much like birds. However, laws do not apply to birds, who are able to fly freely across these anthropocentric boundaries.
My use of maps in this project references the idea of borders and boundaries in addition to the geographic connectivity of a migration route. The actual maps are not representative of the countries they appear to be. This emphasizes the triviality of boundaries and what lies within them. The creation of boundaries is a colonizing practice that disregards pre-existing natural boundaries of ecosystems and indigenous boundaries that were there first.
There is a strange phenomena that is occurring during this year’s seasonal time of migration. Birds such as Wilson’s warblers and barn swallows have left their homes in the northeast of the United States and Canada, beginning their journey to Central and South America. However, many of these birds are not surviving their full journeys. Birds are found falling dead from the sky, and no one is sure why. The most probable answer lies in the unseen effects of deforestation and climate change. The pit stops where birds usually stop to rest their wings and eat have been increasingly deforested in the past years. Accordingly, researchers speculate that birds could be trying to make the entire flight in one trip rather than taking multiple breaks.
Arvind Panjabi, an ornithologist with the Bird Conservancy of the Rockies, hypothesized that the smoke from fires occurring on the west coast of the US is impacting the air quality and affecting the lungs of migrating birds. It is also possible that climate change has impacted the availability of insects birds feed on. These effects of climate change on migration are transforming birds into climate refugees. Seeing birds as such brings awareness to the human climate refugees who are forced to flee their homes due to wildfires, bad air quality, flooding, drought and other natural disasters resulting from climate change. These bird deaths are foreshadowing the increasing effects climate change will have on people.
Countless refugees, escaping climate-caused disaster and other forms of social strife, die in their attempts to reach a better life. Those that find themselves in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities too often never make it out. Both birds and people are dying on their journey looking for a better life.
