The Red List
Seventy endangered birds
The Red List
Yellowhammer and yellow wagtail
The Red List
Cambridge Museum of Zoology
Consider the Red List
Holding a dead bird in your hand is a privilege. To stare at it and to examine its body enables you to understand its exquisite engineering and its vulnerability.
Tragically, in 2022 the number of endangered British birds rose to a staggering 70 birds on the Red List. (Severe decline of at least 50% in the breeding population over the last 25 years.)
So what do 70 birds look like and how can we imagine this number? How can we experience the deep sense of loss to our environment and to ourselves? Visiting the 'skin' collections at the Natural History Museum in Tring and the Norwich Castle Museum gave me the opportunity to contemplate the scale of the loss.
The making of the Red List exhibitionHolding a dead bird in your hand is a privilege. To stare at it and to examine its body enables you to understand its exquisite engineering and its vulnerability.
Tragically, in 2022 the number of endangered British birds rose to a staggering 70 birds on the Red List. (Severe decline of at least 50% in the breeding population over the last 25 years.)
So what do 70 birds look like and how can we imagine this number? How can we experience the deep sense of loss to our environment and to ourselves? Visiting the 'skin' collections at the Natural History Museum in Tring and the Norwich Castle Museum gave me the opportunity to contemplate the scale of the loss.