The Lost Bird Project has landed in the garden surrounding the Bryan Museum in Galveston. The outdoor exhibit features five sculptures representing birds that have gone extinct. A sixth monument stands in Galveston Island State Park.
The project is the brainchild of sculptor Todd McGrain. Copies of the memorials have toured the country since 2008. “Forgetting is another kind of extinction,” he says in the feature length documentary made about his two-year struggle to permanently place the person-size bronze memorials near where the birds were last seen.
• The Great Auk monument stands on Fogo Island, Newfoundland, looking toward Iceland where the bird disappeared in 1844.
• Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., has the monument to the Heath Hen, a subspecies of the greater prairie chicken, last spotted in 1932.
• The Labrador Duck monument stands in Elmira, N.Y., near where the last confirmed sighting was in 1878.
• The memorial to the Passenger Pigeon stands in Columbus, Ohio, honoring the last passenger pigeon, who died in 1914 in the Cincinnati Zoo.
• Near Okeechobee, Fla., is the memorial to the last wild Carolina Parakeet, killed in 1904.
The sixth permanent sculpture, the Eskimo Curlew, was installed in Galveston Island State Park in April 2020. The six-foot bronze statue with the long curved beak looks out over the flat marsh near where the last documented sighting of the bird happened in 1962.
The Lost Bird Project sculptures will be on the grounds of the Bryan Museum in Galveston through Feb. 28, 2021. The outdoor exhibit is free. For information about the Eskimo curlew statue go to www.galvestonnaturetourism.org. For information about Todd McGrain, the Lost Bird Project, and to watch the documentary, go to www.lostbird.org.
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This article appears in December 25 • 2020.
