logo Avian Invaders
POST Chicago teams up with the NCA
In the Summer of 2003 I was commissioned by an initiative called POST Chicago to do a poster project. I spent several hours each week in the Spring and Summer of 2003 studying the birds of Chicago's Humboldt Park (both the neighborhood and the park), where I've lived since 1999. The poster I made is a snap-shot of the avian population, an interpretation of the data I collected.

I found that, as with most of North America, the most abundant birds in Humboldt Park are non-native birds, that thrive in areas of human habitation, both rural and urban. I illustrated the most common of these birds on the poster and briefly described how they came to be in North America.


European Starling (also "Common Starling") with moon in its mouth.


Click the image to downlaod a full size PDF of the poster (5Mb)

I mailed more than thirty of these posters to neighborhood schools and cultural organizations. Another forty or so were posted around the neighborhood. I have limited amount of these posters left, if you would like one, please get in touch with me. Or download the unwieldy PDF and find a large format printer to print your own. The posters we sent to schools and hung in the neighborhood were printed by Ideotech.

Here are some highly recomended books I used for this project:

Tinkering with Eden: A Natural History of Exotic Species in America
a book by Kim Todd.

Peterson Field Guides: Eastern Birds
A book for identifying birds in Eastern North America (Humboldt Park), full of great illustrations, by Roger Tory Peterson.

The Birder's Handbook: A Field Guide to the Natural History of North American Birds
A book full of tons of great, short essays about the birds of North America, written by Paul R. Ehrlich, David S. Dobkin, and Darryl Wheye.

All three of the above books are available in the Chicago Public Library.

The Molecular Invasion
A book by an artist group called Critical Art Ensemble about understanding and dealing with biotechnology, download it for free at their webpage (www.critcal-art.net), find it at book stores like Quimby's or the Seminary Co-op in Chicago, or order it from the publisher, Autonomedia.