SEBASTIAN — The Friends of St. Sebastian River and the Pelican Island Audubon Society, will be co-hosting a special film presentation, “The Lost Bird Project,” for its Nov. 10 meeting, at 6 p.m. at the North County Library, Sebastian.
Todd McGrain, an Associate Professor, at Cornell University, made large bronze sculptures to memorialize five extinct North American birds: Carolina Parakeet, Passenger Pigeon, Labrador Duck, Heath Hen, and Great Auk.
This film is an elegy and a thoughtful, moving, sometimes humorous look at the artist and his mission through his art. The film takes the audience to the sites where the last bird of each species was found. One of the last known locations of the Carolina Parakeet in the wild is right here in Indian River County on the banks of the St. Sebastian River, at what today is the Cypress Bend Community Preserve in Sebastian.
Come see this timely film as other birds are now on the edge of extinction. Audubon’s recent unprecedented analysis of 40 years of citizen-science bird population data from their own Christmas Bird Counts plus the Breeding Bird Survey reveals alarming declines for many of the most common and beloved birds.
Since 1967 the average population of the common birds in steepest decline has fallen by 68 percent. Some individual species nose-dived as much as 80 percent. All 20 birds on the national Common Birds in Decline list lost at least half their populations in just four decades.
For more information, visit the Pelican Island Audubon Society at www.pelicanislandaudubon.org, or the Friends of St. Sebastian River at www.fssr.org.
A special field trip to Cypress Bend Community Preserve site will be on Sunday, Nov. 16, at 2 p.m. Call the Audubon office (772)-567-3520 for reservations.
