Songbirds Journeys – Viajes de Pájaros Cantores
By hola | Published | No Comments
A migration story and exhibit that highlights our shared human experiences
The event’s invitation features artwork by Dominican artist, Gaby D’Alessandro
In the short film by local filmmakers premiering this Thursday, an elderly Washington resident describes her delight at the call of a bird she grew up with in El Salvador.
“It was something I’d heard before,” she speaks into the camera, “not every night, one night a week or once a month. It was the sound of the owl.”
She and other Washington-area immigrants from Central America discuss the birds of their childhoods and homelands. They mimic birdcalls and intimate cherished sightings—from common characters such as the Wood Thrush (a migrant that happens to be the District’s official bird) to the majestic and sacred Queztal, Guatemala’s official bird famed for it’s vibrate plumage and long tail; a bird so beautiful and prized that its very survival is now threatened, like so many other birds that we take for granted today.
These personal stories are the centerpiece of Songbird Journeys (Viajes de Pájaro Cantores Exposición), a short film and exhibit staring DC Latino residents and National Audubon Society staff members, and discussing the billions of birds that migrate back and forth between North and South America each year.
Through an interactive presentation, the exhibit aims to help viewers understand the birds’ migratory patterns and how our observations of their flights unite people in the Western Hemisphere. The exhibit begins its own migration, of sorts, at the Josephine Butler Parks Center in Columbia Heights this Thursday, Oct. 13, before starting a yearlong tour of D.C. Latino hubs. In November it’ll be at the Sacred Heart School on Park Road, and moves to the GALA Hispanic Theater in December.
We interviewed Steve Dryden of Rock Creek Songbirds, a program of the Audubon Society of the District of Columbia, who spearheaded the project.
He says the film’s central theme is how the billions of birds that migrate each year “really unite our hemisphere in an ecological future together,” Dryden says. We are all touched by their migrations, he notes. “And of course,” he adds, “there’s also that environmental action part of it; you also need to have trees everywhere all up and down the hemisphere” if the birds are to be able to continue the flights they have made for millennia.
While there are interactive games, lots of children’s activities, and other elements designed to draw the spectator into the story, the centerpiece of the exhibit is the bilingual film that features about a dozen interviews of D.C. Latino residents about their experience with birds and conservation projects thousands of miles away in Latin American countries, where birds that summer in Rock Creek Park return each year with the changing seasons. Each interview is subtitled in English or Spanish to make it accessible to a wide spectrum of Washington residents.
“We talk about what unifies us, rather than what divides us, because we are all part of this phenomenon,” Dryden says. “In this political season and given climate, it’s unfortunate about how division has been exacerbated and we are having to go through this horrible moment in politics.
“It’s really too bad [because] we are all in this together environmentally [and] ecologically,” Dryden says, adding that an awareness of birds and their migratory patterns can help us understand how closely tied our human wellbeing is to the rest of nature.
The opening night will be a community affair, featuring music by the local D.C. band, Elena & Los Fulanos, and the Panamanian-style hors d’oeuvres by Esencia Panamenas, a local catering company. The exhibit was possible thanks to grants from Humanities DC and the D.C. Mayor’s Office on Latino Affairs, local residents and other supporters such as Casey Trees, which has worked with Audubon volunteers in the past to plant trees near the Piney Branch tributary of Rock Creek.
Between the hors d’oeuvres, the music and film on opening night, the public will have a chance to learn more about the birds that share our local communities and ask questions about the exhibit and the organization as a whole. Several people interviewed in the film are expected to be on hand Thursday, including David Ventura, the owner of El Torogoz restaurant in Petworth who has supported the work, and residents who attend the Vida Senior Center, an Adams Morgan bilingual recreation center for retired residents, including several of the interviewees.
The exhibit is part of D.C. Audubon’s Rock Creek Songbirds program, which works year round to educate the local Latino community by visiting schools near Rock Creek Park. It also invokes hands-on participation from students and teachers as they learn about the migratory patterns between the continents. Together, these school groups plant trees and create banners and crafts that invite appreciation of the birds and their journey.
“There’s an environmental mantra about how everybody lives downstream. If you’re on a river, what happens upstream affects you,” Dryden says. The songbird’s journey “is something that unifies us in so many different ways.”
Songbird Journeys (Viajes de Pájaro Cantores Exposición) opens this Thursday, Oct. 13 at 6:30 p.m. at the Jospehine Butler Parks Center, 2437 15th St NW, Washington, DC 20009
—Charlei Baylor
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