Cornell’s Lab Ornithology’s Great Backyard Bird Count ended yesterday with huge amounts of participation worldwide. Results coming early March. Bird migrating in our area will be here soon, a situation begging for the next best thing to help birds: make our windows collision safe. Collisions kill one BILLION birds in the United States alone every year! Audubon has a great brochure with easy and super effective ideas - @audubon.org/news/simple-solutions-prevent-collisions This brings me back to last November, when I found this unfortunate black-capped chickadee resting at the foot of my studio glass door. It was too late for her but the brochure told me exactly what to do to avoid more casualties. I spent that weekend making small bioplastic dots sprinkled with eggshells and placed them OUTSIDE the glass, in a 2x2’’ pattern. It works well and looks so neat, while non-obstructive from the inside! On another window, a stuck-on bird feeder slows the birds down and offers a close-up look at their feeding habits…so special. #Audubon #cornelllabofornithology #biomaterials #ecoarts #birdwatchers

This weekend is the Great Backyard Bird COunt! Great time for me to share about a fantastic January weekend spent among fellow teachers at the Shelburne Farms Climate Creative, where I was invited as guest artist to co-lead activities linking art and ecology. We took a brief (it was frrreeezing!) birding excursion on the shores of Lake Champlain, with the complete assistance of Cornell’s Merlin, an app that identifies birds through their songs and visualizes them as spectrograms. Hard to imagine how many more birds surround us than what the eye can see! The photos show how, inspired by the gorgeous spectrograms materializing in the app with every bird song or call, we used stamps hand-carved prior to the workshop to match birds and songs, and to freely visualize Shelburne Farms’ local tweet symphony! I am so grateful for the time spent @shelburnefarms in Vermont. Thank you Aimee and Emily, fabulous Climate Creative learning facilitators, for inviting me! Thank you to all my colleagues who so enthusiastically engaged in all activities! To all teachers out there looking to take their classroom outdoors, I highly recommend to check out Shelburne Farms’ Climate Creative, Climate Resiliency Fellowship, and many other workshops. #climate education #bird #climatearts #artbynature #naturalarts

Starting tomorrow! It’s prep time for two soul-refreshing days of sitting under the trees of the beautiful WSA woods, journaling, foraging natural materials, turning them into art supplies, and expressing ourselves freely and playfully. There are still a couple of spaces! Come join a wonderful group of art explorers and combine your love for the natural world with your sense of curiosity and creativity. Not too late to register at woodstockschoolofart.org/course/artmakingbynature-3/ Thank you @_woodstockschoolofart for maintaining gorgeous land and sculpture paths and making it available to this workshop #artbynature #naturearts #naturebounty #naturalinks #earthart #landart

At the High School for Environmental Studies last week making mycopaper as part of their pre-Earth day celebrations. Awesome kids! Almost beat cell phone appeal. Almost. 😅

Conversation and Art About Climate Change at the Fashion Institute of Technology. We chat while making art… here with my homemade bioplastic! The vibrant colors are plant inks. What is bioplastic? It’s petroleum-free plastic, made from food-based ingredients like algae or gelatin, entirely compostable. Dehydrated food waste can be integrated into these recipes to create biomaterials for many industries. Can you imagine all the banana peels or eggshells in a day being reprocessed into biomaterials? (@ottanstudio ; @youyang_song ) The plastic problem hasn’t been solved yet, but some scientists and designers are certainly working on it, creating circular systems to replace it. We’re not there yet, and now is NOT the moment to shut down the research!! Let’s fight for bio research and climate research. #plasticpollution #noplastic #oneplanet #climateconversations #climatecafe #artfortheplanet #zerowastefashion #zerowasteart #sustainablesdesigns

Nothing will stop us - not even the rain. Hands Off.