Hawks, swans, geese, plovers: Around her home in Sagaponack, Roberta Olson sees many kinds of birds nesting or flying by. But she worries about some of them. A few species are becoming sparser, others that should be wintering farther south are now finding Long Island warm enough.
"You might say that birds are really the canary in the coal mine for our entire planet," Olson said recently, standing surrounded by birds of a different sort.
These are depicted in watercolors, painted two centuries ago by history's most famous avian memorializer, John James Audubon, and they fill a large room at the New-York Historical Society in
Although her Long Island bird-watching habit was not a prerequisite for her job, they both reflect her sensibility of caring about wildlife, looking closely at the world and paying attention to details.
The exhibit includes tips from the National Audubon Society on ways to protect birds, such as preserving farmlands and wetlands, patrolling beaches and fighting global warming. A video on imperiled birds is part of the exhibit, as is a dramatic soundscape: Visitors can hear individual birdsongs as they approach some of the paintings, while a whooping crane - audibly, not visibly - seems to fly over the space every 20 minutes. Olson says she had the room painted a blue that is "a little more dusky, like twilight" for this year's endangered-species theme.
The exhibit is the fourth in a five-part series, each one focusing on a different aspect of Audubon's work. Another nice touch: Visitors may borrow magnifying glasses to decipher details in Audubon's intricate portraits from the 1820s and '30s.
Olson says she often observes birds as she rides her horse or just looks out her windows. For years, she says, she regularly saw a barn owl (a bird pictured in the exhibit) before a red-tailed hawk took up residence nearby and scared it away. Just a few weeks ago, she watched two swans she knows from their East Hampton pond flying in that direction from Water Mill.
Olson says new construction worries her. "You can't preserve the species if you can't preserve the land," she says. She sees fewer goldfinches (discussed in the exhibit's video) than she used to. She also recently saw blue jays, woodpeckers and robins, some of which, she thinks, used to fly farther south. She picked up her passion in part, she says, from her father-in-law, an avid birder.
Like many Long Islanders, she says, she walks carefully around the roped-off areas on beaches that protect nests of the piping plover, one of the top-10 endangered birds on the Audubon Society's list and the subject of an Audubon painting. The American oystercatcher, which inhabits the saltwater marsh islands of Jamaica Bay, is another species included in the exhibit that deserves local concern: It's on a watch list, with 72,000 left - only 7,500 of them in North America.
The exhibit's 42 watercolors are endangered, too. They're light sensitive and will soon be sent into a decadelong hibernation in specially designed archival storage containers at the historical society.
Meanwhile, Audubon's pictures invite careful scrutiny: "They always have a narrative," Olson says. "Notice how he has the birds looking at you," or looking at each other. In their interactions - one bird feeds a mate, another appears to mourn a dead partner - they seem human. "This is what makes Audubon a truly great artist," she says. "He really got inside the birds."
"Audubon's Aviary: Portraits of Endangered Species," New-York Historical Society, 170
