The Lost Bird Project
In the early 19th century, flocks of over one billion Passenger Pigeons darkened the skies and took three days to pass overhead. They were the most abundant bird on the planet. By 1900, the last one was shot by a boy in southern Ohio. How did this happen?
Moved by the story of the Passenger Pigeon and four other North American birds driven to extinction in modern times - the Heath Hen, the Carolina Parakeet, the Labrador Duck and the Great Auk - artist Todd McGrain set out to memorialize the lost birds with large, evocative bronze sculptures and place them where the birds were last seen in the wild. The memorials are not naturalistic works of biological detail but shapes that capture the presence of the birds, to make them personal and palpable, to remind us of their absence.
“These birds are not commonly known,” McGrain says, “and they ought to be, because forgetting is another kind of extinction. It’s such a thorough erasing.”
The Lost Bird Project is directed by Deborah Dickson, whose previous films have been nominated three times for an Oscar®, and produced by Muffie Meyer, whose previous directing credits include the original “Grey Gardens” documentary and several Emmy®-award-winning documentaries.
The film follows the road-trip that McGrain and his brother-in-law, Andy, take as they search for the locations where the birds were last seen and negotiate for permission to install the sculptures there. The journey leads the pair from the swamps of Florida, the final roosting ground of the Carolina Parakeet, to a tiny island off the coast of Newfoundland, where some of the last Great Auks made their nests and where the local townspeople still mourn their absence 150 years later. McGrain’s aim in placing the sculptures is to give presence to the birds where they are now so starkly absent.
The film is an elegy to the five birds and a thoughtful and sometimes humorous look at the artist and his mission. The Lost Bird Project is a “buddy movie” about public art, extinction and memory.
The Montreal Mirror called the film, “a stunning and evocative work about art, nature and our imperiled planet,” while The Montreal Gazette described it as “entertaining, whimsical … and certainly very moving.” The Martha’s Vineyard Times spoke of the emotion, “Watching it … I was crying.”