Illustration by Julia Stone

Our feathered friends have become the number one topic in our house, thanks to it being the current project in Lotte’s first grade class. As well as the fact that each walk to school now takes twice as long as we try to identify the various sparrows, tits, blackbirds, ducks, crows and pigeons along the short stretch of the Panke river we walk along to reach the U-Bahn station. She has a book as well, a lovely thing from the RSPB that has pictures of the most common birds and tick boxes so that she can start her collection. In school the project allows the teacher to cover all kinds of things, from reading and writing to drawing and maths, without the kids cottoning on that they are actually learning. Because after all, birds are fun.

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Ghosts of Gone Birds is about raising a creative army for conservation through a series of multimedia exhibitions and events that are concerned with breathing artistic life back into extinct birds species, whilst raising awareness of those species that teeter on the edge of extinction but can still be saved. Over 120 artists, writers and musicians took part in the London phase of the project, which featured a couple of events in the English capital last November.

Alongside the events, the website features a gallery of images by the different artists involved, a shop where you can buy limited edition prints (including some wonderful drawings by legendary illustrator Ralph Steadman) and a series of “Ghost Stories” in association with BirdLife International as part of their Preventing Extinctions programme. Here’s an example:

FISH HOOKS DON’T JUST HOOK FISH. THEY CATCH AND KILL 100,000 ALBATROSS. EVERY YEAR.

Dying at a rate of around one every five minutes, the albatross family is fast becoming the most threatened family of birds in the world. In fact, they are disappearing at a rate faster than they can actually breed – so 18 out of the 22 species of albatross are now facing global extinction.

BirdLife International set up the Albatross Task Force to work with local fishermen in countries throughout the world to introduce new practices that would reduced the life-threatening danger to seabirds.

And as a result, in countries like South Africa there has been a 85% decrease in the number of seabirds caught in fishing lines.

It is the combination of the creative with the campaigning that gives Ghosts of Gone Birds such a persuasive message, and it will be really interesting to see what they have planned for future exhibitions and events. You can see a complete list of the artists involved in the project so far here.

This was sent to us by Ian Wright, a good friend of Under a Grey Sky, and we think that not only is this for a good cause, but a fairly unusual and distinctive way of raising money, so we would like to wish Tristan all the best with his efforts:

I have set myself a rather unusual challenge to raise funds for the Turkish wildlife charity DogaDernegi. After a recent wildlife holiday in southern and central Turkey, I fell in love with the country. The amazing biodiversity, awesome scenery and fantastic culture meant that it had a huge impact on my life.

On return to the UK, I was devastated to learn that the Turkish government had sold off all the country’s waterways to private corporations. There are now over 2,000 dams being built and over 1,730 hydro-electric schemes planned. The impact this will cause is disastrous. Not only will the habitats of one of the most biodiverse countries in the Western Palearctic be damaged beyond repair, but many small communities are likely to be displaced, thus destroying these traditional micro-cultures.

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By George McKinney:

The south east corner of Spain is the only place in Europe to find this sparrow-sized bird so we started our search near the village of San Miguel del Cabo de Gata.  Shingle beaches stretch several miles west from the pueblo towards the old fishing village of El Retamar, in the direction of the Almeria Airport and the newer tourist centre of El Toyo.  A short distance in that direction we happily spent time scanning the Ramblia Morales and enjoyed seeing White-headed ducks, flamingos, egrets, crag martins and, although it is ‘impossible’ according to the bird-books, we spotted the white rump and square tail of a Little Swift which visited the ramblia just as we did, then flew off east along the coast.

In that direction beyond the pueblo lies a 400-meter wide sand-bar which separates the Mediterranean sea from the still-operational Salinas of Almadraba de Montelva. This large area of wetland habitat is designated as a Special Protection Area for birds [SPA (1989)] and as a Wetland of International Importance [Ramsar (1989] so we spent happy hours overlooking these Salinas in good hides and watching a fine variety of ducks and waders in the shallow water, and warblers and larks in the scrub along the edges of the pools. Continue reading →