Adopt a bird

UPDATE! New pages: http://audun.teks.no/adoptabird/adopt/

 

 

Adopt a bird. An art  project in Vasa, spring 2011.

This page will be updated as the project progresses.

The aim of «adopt a bird» is to raise awareness among possibly «nature alienated» people of the quickly changing environment around us and hopefully to strengthen interest and engagement in nature conservation. It’s also a commentary on owning/having since it addresses our responsibility to preserve nature for coming generations.
In it’s simplest form this project will assign a bird from an already existing database of ringed birds to individual people signing up as adoptive parents. With cooperation from the worldwide network of information exchange of data from recaptured ringed birds, it will be possible to give the «adoptive parents» feedback if «their» bird is captured somewhere and what shape it is in. The species of bird chosen for the project should be one that has the highest possible percentage of recapture so that there is some probability of giving feedback to the «parents».  This project is of course dependent on the goodwill of scientists, but does not pose substantial additional work on their part. Rather I hope to use already existing networks and databases, and link this up to the project. Even better result could be obtained with working closely with scientists that are following a smaller group of birds or other animals closely over a longer period. I hope to find scientists that share my intent to engage the general public in such a way, and therefore are willing to give me access to some  data. Already, many databases of ringed birds have an interface for the public where people can check the status of a bird they submit. I want to make a similar solution, automate it, so that people will get updates on “their” bird. Please note that I’m very aware that such databases/ and data should not be made public in such a way that it may be exploited. I will find an acceptable solution as to what kind of data can be sent to whom.

My part would be working with the public relations, artistic presentation and to find scientists interested in participating. I hold a master in biology from the university of NTNU in Trondheim which may help in this work.

The artist in residency program is hosted by Platform.

Audun Eriksen