‘Birdwatching is close to rapture’: Margaret Atwood on why she has given C$1m to avian research — SkimNews
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- Margaret Atwood donated C$1m (£540,000) to Western University in London, Ontario, announced Friday, endowing the Graeme Gibson chair in avian biology to study how birds move, adapt and behave in a changing environment
- The gift honors Graeme Gibson, a novelist who died in 2019 after vascular dementia ended his bird journaling; he co-founded the Pelee Island Bird Observatory more than two decades ago and kept watching birds daily even after he could no longer name them
- Western University has emerged as a global leader in avian research, building the world's first hypobaric climatic wind tunnel for bird flight; co-director Chris Guglielmo said he was told to sit down before receiving the news of the gift
- Pelee Island, the southernmost community in Canada and the site of the recently opened Atwood-Gibson Bird Centre, sits at the intersection of the Atlantic and Mississippi migration routes and welcomes more than 200 species each spring
- Canada and the US have lost nearly 3bn birds since 1970, with long-distance migratory species declining nearly 30%; the blackpoll warbler, which flies nonstop almost 1,800 miles over open water to South America, has dropped more than 80% in five decades
- Atwood named the four biggest human-caused threats to birds as windows, cats, toxic pollution and habitat destruction, urging that "birds have specific habitats that they need, so it's not like spreading butter on a piece of toast"
Why it matters: The endowed chair gives a leading avian research facility permanent funding to pursue questions about magnetic navigation and migration that its own scientists say they lack the people and time to chase. With North America's bird population down roughly 3bn since 1970 and long-distance migrants down nearly 30%, that research isn't academic — it directly informs how Canada and the US respond to steep, ongoing declines in species the blackpoll warbler represents.
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