Margaret Atwood donates $1M to establish avian biology chair

Margaret Atwood has given C$1 million to Western University to create the Graeme Gibson chair in avian biology, honoring her late partner’s passion for birds and advancing our understanding of one of nature’s most mysterious creatures.

Atwood, the bestselling Canadian author whose speculative fiction has won countless awards, established the fund to help researchers answer some of the most fundamental questions about how birds navigate, adapt, and survive in a rapidly changing world. Gibson, also a novelist, died in 2019 after spending his final years watching birds daily despite vascular dementia stealing his ability to journal about them.

“Our back yard feeder and our birdbath were attracting only sparrows and robins and grackles and the occasional pigeon, but he didn’t care: every bird was worthy of attention,” Atwood wrote in a foreword to Gibson’s book, The Bedside Book of Birds.

The mysteries that remain unsolved

Chris Guglielmo, co-director of the advanced facility for avian research at Western University, received the gift with genuine astonishment. “We have a lot of descriptive understanding of what happens when we manipulate the magnetic fields, for example, the bird changes its orientation,” Guglielmo explains. “We know they have these senses. But how they actually work is still a big mystery.”

Western has emerged as a global leader in avian research, developing the world’s first hypobaric climatic wind tunnel for bird flight and making significant contributions to understanding how migratory birds fuel themselves and survive long-distance journeys spanning thousands of kilometers.

Yet even the leading minds remain stumped. Guglielmo’s whiteboard is covered with potential research questions he simply doesn’t have enough funding, people, or time to answer. How do birds sense magnetic fields? How do they navigate across continents? What allows them to complete nonstop journeys of nearly 1,800 miles over open water?

A troubling decline

These questions matter urgently. Canada and the US have lost nearly 3 billion birds since 1970. While certain species like ducks and birds of prey have surged, migratory birds have dropped by nearly 30%. The blackpoll warbler, which breeds as far north as the Arctic before journeying to South America, has plummeted more than 80% in five decades, making it the fastest declining songbird.

Atwood attributes the decline to four main threats humans can help address: windows, cats, toxic pollution, and habitat destruction. The first two are relatively straightforward to tackle, but the latter presents a more complex challenge.

“People think: we can cut down this forest, and we’ll just make another forest over there,” Atwood says. “It’s not going to be the same. Birds have specific habitats that they need.”

Hope as a starting point

Despite her career spent imagining dystopian futures, Atwood remains cautiously optimistic. She points to surging interest in birding among young people and the broader reconnection with nature emerging across generations.

“Unless some grown-up teaches them to be afraid of such things, that interest will continue,” she says of children’s natural draw to the living world. “We are part of the natural world. It’s your choice of how to be in it.”

Atwood’s gift arrives as the Atwood-Gibson Bird Centre officially opened on Pelee Island, Canada’s southernmost community, located where two major bird migration routes converge. The observatory, which the couple co-founded over two decades ago, now has expanded facilities for studying transcontinental bird movement and, conveniently for Atwood, refuge from chiggers.

She remains clear-eyed about the stakes. “Utopia is impossible, but if you don’t believe in the ability to attain something better, you will inevitably end up in a dystopia,” Atwood reflects. “Because dystopia is quite possible.”

Source: BBC News

If we can harness the passion that drives both scientists and birders, perhaps we still have time to answer the questions that could save the species we’ve nearly lost.