Banded by a Prayer – Flathead Beacon

For so long as Daniel Lombardi can bear in mind, a digicam was by no means too removed from his arms. At first one thing to play with whereas rising up on a farm in Montana, Lombardi’s digicam shortly grew to become a solution to higher perceive the world round him.

“Photography and art have just always been the tool I’m using to interface with the world,” Lombardi stated. “If I’m encountering any new thing, I’m probably going to try and make sense of it through art, whether that’s sketching, painting, photography, or writing, or whatever it is.”

In his early maturity, Lombardi was lucky to stay with a bunch of wildlife biologists whose analysis launched him to a different considered one of his passions — one thing that’s now the centerpiece of his first-ever images present.

“They got me interested in the birds around me and it just slowly became a greater and greater interest of mine over the years,” Lombardi stated. “Then in 2021, I started volunteering with bird banding stations.”

Bird banding is a software utilized by researchers and conservationists that consists of the systematic capturing, measuring and marking of untamed birds to watch elements of their life cycles to guard populations internationally.

“Individual birds of the same species are hard to tell apart. I can’t necessarily tell one robin from another robin,” Lombardi stated. “It’s kinda like on the lookout for the distinction between two blue Subaru Outbacks on the trailhead parking zone.

“When you get to the trailhead and there’s a row of Subaru Outbacks, it can be tough to tell which one is my car again. But every car has a license plate so you can’t get really confused in the end, and bird banding is kind of like giving individual birds a license plate for identification.”

To feed his love for group science efforts, Lombardi volunteers his images abilities as a part of the Institute for Bird Populations’ program, MAPS, which stands for Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship. The program is a collaborative effort throughout North America to help the conservation of birds and their habitats via standardized fowl monitoring.

MAPS fowl banders accumulate information to estimate key demographic parameters often known as very important charges, similar to productiveness, recruitment, and survival of particular person fowl species, in line with the institute. This data helps scientists perceive which life-stages could also be most essential in driving inhabitants change.

“Bird banding is a really special kind of science. I think for a lot of people who do it, it is almost spiritual,” Lombardi stated. “It’s very special to a lot of the people who practice this kind of research and science.”

Starting in 2021, Lombardi started taking photos of the birds being banded via the MAPS program, capturing photographs of birds from Northwest Montana and Southern Alberta.

Extremely detailed photographs of the birds have been particularly vital within the banding course of to help in researcher’s efforts to chronicle an essential information level: the approximate age of every fowl.

“It’s a pretty difficult thing to do and it’s a specialized skill,” Lombardi stated. “One of the reasons it made sense for me to bring a camera to bird banding is that taking pictures of birds up close with open wings is helpful … for aging and examining the molt patterns in the birds’ feathers so that you can more exactly age them. Then, when you have those photos, you can just include that in the data set.”

Years after taking the photographs for this system, Lombardi took a second have a look at the pictures — this time via a lens with a spotlight far past scientific.

“As I was looking back at all the photos, I realized how … I hesitate to use the word ‘spiritual,’ but it looks spiritual. As people are holding the birds, often right when they’re about to release them, it looked like a kind of religious gesture; like praying hands or something,” Lombardi stated.

“When I printed those using the cyanotype printing process, that religious or spiritual look became even more pronounced, and that really got my mind wandering in sci-fi speculative fiction directions,” he added. “The images stopped looking scientific and started looking like ancient religious text and that’s when the idea for this project kind of came.”

Cyanotype is a nineteenth century photographic printing course of that produces distinctive cyan-blue prints utilizing UV gentle and was generally used for botanical prints. The method entails coating paper or material with a combination of ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide, arranging objects or negatives on high, exposing it to solar, then rinsing in water.

“Cyanotype photography had connections to scientific study from the very beginning,” Lombardi stated. “So, this is kind of a continuation of that.”

While fowl banding is regimented and requires care and warning to make sure the security of the birds, cyanotype printing is extra experimental, Lombardi stated, and permits him to relinquish management.

“There are many variables that you don’t understand, so you’ll go to print an image and it just won’t turn out because your water was a little too alkaline or because the paper you used had some sort of bleach in it,” Lombardi stated. “Where bird banding requires a lot of strict caution, cyanotype is space where you have a lot of, ‘well, let’s see what happens.’”

Lombardi experimented with numerous chemical combos till he discovered the suitable ones to make use of for the 25 photographs featured in his present, “Recalling Birds,” which will probably be featured at Kalispell’s Good Luck Gallery this spring.

“Usually, it would take one or two tries or two or three tries before the image came out, but besides that, there were dozens and dozens of test prints for several years to get the process right,” Lombardi stated.

“Recalling Birds,” which is able to run from March 6 to April 17, is about greater than artistically capturing a second in a scientific course of, nonetheless.

At the guts of the present is an effort to lift consciousness of the discount of birds in North America, as practically 3 billion birds have been misplaced since 1970, Lombardi stated. All print gross sales from the present will profit the Flathead Audubon Society.

Adding a science-fiction literary aspect to the present, Lombardi wrote three vignettes to encourage the viewer of the pictures to “stretch their imagination” and take into consideration long-term potentialities sooner or later the place there aren’t any birds, he stated.

“I’m excited for the show because it’s a chance to promote the value of science and expertise in studying the natural world, and share these animals that I find really important and I think a lot of other people do as well,” Lombardi stated. “It’s also to raise awareness and remind people that the health of the natural world, including birds, is not guaranteed.”

The “Recalling Birds” exhibition will run at Kalispell’s Good Luck Gallery, 127 Main St., from March 6 via April 17. All print gross sales from the present will profit the Flathead Audubon Society. A reception to have a good time the opening of “Recalling Birds” will happen from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. on Friday, March 6. The opening is free and open to the general public.