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Help bring the story of Captain Perkins and Great Lakes bird migration to life!
THE CAPTAIN PERKINS PROJECT
Wings Over the Inland Seas
A voyage of discovery, celebration, and conservation of one of the largest natural phenomena on earth.
Image: Bjornberg Photography
The Great Lakes are a wilderness. No one, not even today, had a better understanding of bird migration out over the Great Lakes than Captain Perkins.
Francie Cuthbert, Professor Emeritus of Ornithology, Department of Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation Biology, University of Minnesota.
“Picking up on the trail where he left off….” Watch our project teaser video to glimpse Captain Perkins’ passion for bird migration, NatureWerks drive to rediscover what Perk saw, and the scientists and advocates supporting this project. Videography: CaptureFilmCo; Bird Videography: Sparky Stensaas; Historic Videography: Capt. J. P. Perkins Collection
Strategy
Chronicle Captain Perkins’ life work to foster awareness, ownership, and protection for the Great Lakes bird migration phenomenon he sought to understand and the story that he so passionately told.
Outcomes
Cultivate a rich human-interest story to connect people with nature through the beauty and complexity of migrating birds
Develop film, art, curricular, and multi-media resources to bring to life a natural phenomenon that passes above our houses while we sleep but is notoriously hard to see.
Promote awareness of and safe travel for migrating birds throughout the Great Lakes region by amplifying the actions partners are taking to build bird friendly communities.
Foster implementation of proven practices that mitigate human-caused mortality at critical periods of migratory birds’ life cycles.
With partners, build networks of community pride, identity, and action to celebrate a natural phenomenon and maritime culture unique to the Great Lakes.
Advance science of bird migration by coupling the captain’s data and observations with 21st century techniques to address today’s pressing conservation questions.
Support development and implementation of management relevant tools that map patterns of Great Lakes migratory bird movements in space and time.
Approach
September 1962.
Perk opens the door to the thick scent of cold wet iron. As he squints against the deck lights, the freighter’s speed is revealed by minuscule rainbows reflecting in fog moving past the wheelhouse. Droplets form on his heavy peacoat, the officer jacket of the Pittsburgh Steamship Division. He pauses to sip coffee from the lip of a mug, lest he spill in his eagerness to witness what he’d predicted would happen this night.
“Captain Perk, watch your step!” the lookout yells. “Many are still alive.”
WEATHERING THE STORM. Migratory birds crossing the North American Great Lakes often seek refuge and rest aboard ships, especially during inclement weather. Painting: Neil Davison
September 2010.
I met Captain J. P. “Perk” Perkins in a photo near the center crease of an old magazine. A week had passed since I witnessed what my colleagues at first dubbed a product of a vivid imagination. At a high point along Lake Superior’s northern coast, a predawn cloudburst of songbirds suddenly appeared in the sky above and around me. Thousands of warblers, thrushes, grosbeaks, vireos, and other birds moved en masse from the direction of the lake. Shortly after the sun cleared Superior’s horizon, they vanished.
Sometime later, a frayed magazine landed on my desk with the note, “Read This,” marking a page. By then, the captain had been gone for 20 years.
- Anna Peterson, NatureWerks, excerpts from essays developed with funding from the Minnesota State Arts Board
RECORDING MIGRATORY BIRDS. During both spring and fall, the coastal areas of the North American Great Lakes host massive migratory bird movements and provide essential stopover habitat for the travelers to rest and refuel. Image: Derek Montgomery / MPR.
These flights are among the great spectacles of nature… Although the distances over open water are not nearly as far as those of the Gulf and Caribbean Sea, the hazards are as great or greater: the spring and fall flights often coincide with sudden and violent seasonal storms in which land birds die by the thousands. Windrows of dead birds washed up on the beaches to testify to this.
Captain J. P. Perkins, U.S. Steel Corporation, Audubon Magazine 1964
An Ore Ship Captain and His Onboard Forest
From 1928 to 1972, Captain J. P. “Perk” Perkins sailed the Great Lakes onboard freighters that carried ore and other cargo between Lake Superior and Lake Erie. Perk had a unique passion for birds. For the majority of his life as a mariner, Perk recorded the migratory birds that sought shelter on his ships. He placed bird seed, fresh water, and a cobbled assortment of potted trees on his freighter's deck to attract and better film the birds, an assemblage the crew named Perk’s National Forest.
SHELTERING IN A FREIGHTER’S FOREST. In 1958, after years of photographing the migratory birds that landed on his ships to rest during migration, Captain J.P. Perkins (pictured) created a mini-forest of potted trees for the feathered castaways. Image: J.P. Perkins / U.S. Steel.
GREAT LAKES IRON ISLAND. From hawks to hummingbirds, Captain Perkins recorded over 150 species of migratory birds using his freighters as overwater refuges. The 622 foot Benjamin F. Fairless was one of several ships that hosted Perk’s National Forest. Image: Roger LeLievre / Shipwater News.
After decades of sailing the Great Lakes, Captain Perkins could predict when his freighter would enter any one of 17 different flight corridors that hosted massive numbers of migrating birds. He documented and told stories of his bird migration observations through a film production he called Birds Ahoy. He also published a hand-drawn corridor map in Audubon Magazine to educate the public and scientific community about these over water movement corridors.
Mapping Migration Routes
A CAPTAIN AND A SCIENTIST. Perk was skilled at identifying birds and drew this map based on where his freighters would cross into their migratory flight paths. Image: J.P. Perkins / Audubon Magazine
Challenge: A migration phenomenon under threat
Every fall 90% of the biodiversity in North America’s boreal forest takes to the sky in one of the world’s largest natural phenomena — the boreal bird migration. But in the past 50 years, North America has lost 2.9 billion birds, one-third of the avian population. Most of those lost are migratory birds. One-third of the 4 billion birds that migrate south in the fall will not survive to return in the spring. Human caused threats throughout this journey compound and accelerate already high levels of natural mortality.
MIGRATING TREE SWALLOWS. Migratory birds tend to concentrate in large numbers along any number of U.S. coastlines including the N. American Great Lakes. Image: William Leaman / Alamy
During fall migration, billions of birds travel on a movement trajectory that guides them towards the North American Great Lakes region. Ten percent of the U.S. population (over thirty million people) and thirty percent of the Canadian population (eleven million people) live within the watersheds of the Great Lakes. This includes the cities and metropolitan areas of Duluth, Green Bay, Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, Windsor, Toledo, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Toronto. These same coastal areas host disproportionally large concentrations of birds during migration. Impacts from the most dangerous human-centric threats to birds — including habitat loss, predators, pesticides, and collisions with manmade structures such as buildings, communication towers, wind turbines, and power lines — are intensified in these populated coastal regions.
A CONTINENTAL PHENOMENON. Every fall, up to five billion birds migrate out of North America’s boreal forests to areas as far south as South America. Avoiding the prairies and guided by NW winds, many migrate to and through the Great Lakes region. With only two-thirds surviving the round trip journey, each spring two- to three-billion birds return through the forests of eastern US to their natal breeding grounds. Once again, the Great Lakes are a formidable barrier and essential stopover.
ATTRACTED TO COASTAL GLOW. Nocturnally migrating birds are drawn to artificial light and disproportionately concentrate their movements and stops within Great Lakes coastal cities. Within these ‘light halos,’ mortality caused by collisions with structures and predation by house cats is intensified.
Simple Bird Friendly Solutions Exist, but Are Slow to Take Hold
On a single night in October 2023, nearly 1000 migrating birds died near the shoreline of Lake Michigan when they collided with the windows of Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center. For decades it had been known that this building’s huge lakeside wall of glass caused bird collisions during migration but calls for action went unheard. Then, following this mass tragedy, bird advocacy groups and building owners worked together to have the McCormick Place glass retrofitted with a treatment to make it visible to birds. That action reduced collision mortality by 95% the following fall.
Science and technologies to promote safe passage for migrating birds are proven, as are models of communities working together to take collective action. But widespread awareness of the Great Lakes migration phenomenon itself is still in its infancy and simple conservation actions are largely unrecognized and too seldom implemented.
ONE NIGHT, ONE BUILDING, 1000 DEAD. The avian victims of a Chicago window strike mass casualty event in October of 2023. Photo: Daryl Coldren / Field Museum of Natural History.
URBAN TRAPS & OPPORTUNITIES. Bird friendly glass reduced window strikes on Chicago’s McCormick Place by 95%, but it took a tragedy and collective action to motivate change. Photo: choosechicago.com
Our Solution. Inspire Collective Action.
Adoption of new socially or environmentally beneficial practices is shaped more through compelling stories and values shared through social networks than by scientific or economic information alone. This project inspires conservation through motivating stories, targeted multi-media, and grassroots campaigns designed to build community pride in the Great Lakes bird migration and motivate collective action to protect it. For more information on what you and your community can do to help birds, join our mailing list and check out the resources and examples assembled by Bird City Network.
AN EPIC JOURNEY. TOGETHER WE CAN HELP. Migration is built on foresight, cooperation, hard work, and a little magic. So is habitat restoration. Here volunteers celebrate a job well done following an urban habitat restoration project led by NatureWerks. Restoration removes weedy species and restores the structurally complex native understory birds rely on for food and shelter. Native habitat also promotes flood control, climate resilience, wildflowers, pollinators, and many other species of plants and animals.
In my long career, I have worked on hundreds of research projects. The story of Captain Perkins is one of the most personally compelling. Not only is it an early and valuable example of citizen science, but the captain’s story itself is captivating. NatureWerks threads migration science and his legacy with grace.
Dr. Douglas Johnson, Research Statistician (Emeritus), University of Minnesota and US Geological Survey.
