Crow Funeral

An update on the Pelee Island Bird Observatory, where your money is going, Dear Paid Subscribers...

Yes, I’ve been bad. I haven’t written a new post here for a month! Do you deserve such negligent treatment? You do not. And right in the middle of the French Revolution, too! I cringe with embarrassment. (At least I now know how to spell “embarrassment,” which has not always been the case.)

But I have lots of excuses! Deaths in the family and extended family; churning out the verbiage for a book I am writing, with deadline looming; and, most immediately, making this limited-edition poster design, which I hand-lettered and illustrated. In the first iteration I mis-spelled FUNERAL (FUNARAL), and had it all coloured in before I noticed. But scissors and glue are my friends, and you can’t tell. Can you? (And yes, crows do behave this way…) (The happy skulls are in honor of Mexico…)

This poster of an unpublished poem was done as a gift for the highest-priced tickets for a PIBO event here in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, organized by our Board Chair to raise money for BIRDS ACROSS BORDERS, a PIBO program that connects Mexico (where many of “our” birds spend their winters) and Canada (where many of “their” birds nest in the summers. Here’s the first page of the Power Point we used (I can’t show you the whole PPT because this platform doesn’t accept the format::

It was very kindly hosted in the beautiful home of Jim McKeever and Alfredo García-Lucio, hummingbird specialists and owners of Camino Silvestre, a San Miguel de Allende store specializing in all things creatively avian — and where I got this gorgeous glass hummingbird feeder, now being visited by many hummingbirds, as there’s a drought on and not all of their usual flowers are in bloom. This is not its usual position; I took it down to make the photo:

The money raised will bring this year’s Honorary Birder, the very knowledgeable Rodrigo Lopez, to SpringSong on Pelee Island on the second weekend of May. It will also help support the Graeme Gibson Prismaticos Project (see website, www.pibo.ca ), which brings binoculars to forest guides in Mexico who need them.

As for the money raised through this Substack, the first $50K goes to research, without which we can’t tell which species are declining and which are not. Here’s another slide from the Power Point:

Short message: once all the birds are gone, we will be too. Improving conditions for life on earth means improving conditions for us, because (surprise!) we are part of the biosphere.

After $50K, the next money from this Substack goes to renovating a building on Pelee, from a former liquor store and bike rental into a thing of beauty and a joy forever — as a research hub, and to house the staff and volunteers. It replaces a building that had a black mould and snakes-in-the-shower problem, not great for attracting volunteer bird banders. Below the paywall line, you will see a picture of the building we are restoring, plus some pretty funny AI-generated pics (thanks to a Board member who likes to fool with tech) of the one we had to leave. (AI overdid it on the snakes. That is a trigger warning. Don’t blame me if you EEK!)

Next time: back to the French Revvie, with an all-new, action-packed, relevant-to-our-times episode called Toads of the Marsh. (Yes, that was a thing. They weren’t actual toads, they were National Convention members that other members wanted to kill.)

And thank you, Paid Subscribers! You have already been an enormous help!