Lena Souffrant ’25 Brings New Ideas to Life in “Dead Bird Stories”

Souffrant, Klingle, and Taylor took on the role of detectives as they attempted to reveal the stories behind the long-dead birds. "It was really a series of hunches," Klingle said, starting by looking at their tags and noting where they were collected"-from the shores of the Canadian and Greenlandic Arctic to the banana plantations of Costa Rica.

"And then assuming, rightly, that the names on the tags were not the names of the people who actually went out and shot the birds, prepared the birds, and collected the birds," he continued. "In short, there were these hidden systems of labor."

Souffrant noted that she learned a lot from her hands-on research, but was particularly fascinated by how intertwined natural history and the College have been over the centuries.

Through her independent studies over the past year, she unearthed a dusty historical detail about Bowdoin: the College used to have a natural history museum of its own. She hopes that her exhibit has helped to shed light on the many specimens Bowdoin has access to and how these specimens could be used educationally across the curriculum-in history, Africana studies, Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies, sociology, English, the visual arts, and other fields.

"These collections can and should be used not only for teaching biology, environmental studies, and earth and oceanographic science, but also for teaching in other disciplines across campus," Souffrant said. "The stories of the birds fit perfectly into Bowdoin's liberal arts teaching philosophy."

Klingle echoed her idea about the broad lessons conveyed by "Dead Birds." "Something like this is a testament to the power of the liberal arts, to be able to look at something from different perspectives and to acknowledge how those different perspectives open up new vistas for understanding," he said.

In May, Souffrant will graduate from Bowdoin, and in August, she will matriculate at Yale in a masters degree program for environmental management.