2018 Year of Birds

One hundred years ago, the staggering destruction of birdlife caused by the plume trade spurred the passage of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, one of the earliest environmental laws passed anywhere in the world. While fashion trends have changed, the law remains as important as ever. Birds now face 21st-century threats – gas flares, oil spills, oil waste pits, transmission lines, wind and power turbines and more. The act has been used to help reduce those impacts and to implement practice that saves birds’ lives. The National Geographic magazine, National Audubon Society, the Cornel Lab of Ornithology, and BirdLife International joined together forces and resources with more than hundred other organization and millions of people around the world to celebrate 2018 Year of Bird.

In the book When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice, author and environmental activist Terry Tempest Williams wrote, “Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten, that the world is meant to be celebrated.” (Tempest Williams, 2012)