Margaret Atwood putting her money where her heart is.

‘Birdwatching is close to rapture’: Margaret Atwood on why she has given C$1m to avian research.  

How. nice to be able to do this...

"On Friday Western University, in London, Ontario, announced that Atwood had donated C$1m (£540,000) to celebrate her late partner’s love of birds.

The gift will create the Graeme Gibson chair in avian biology, with the goal of better understanding the fundamental processes that shape how birds move, adapt and behave in an environment undergoing profound transformation.

Atwood has championed many causes, including Indigenous education and human rights, but environmental protection is at the forefront of them.

“I have what they call a platform,” she says. “And I also had what they call extra money.”"

Chiggers!  

"Weeks before the gift was announced, Atwood celebrated the opening of the Atwood-Gibson Bird Centre on Pelee Island. Resembling a towel hung loosely from a clothesline, Pelee Island is a rare enclave that blends Carolinian forest, dunes and marshes. Sitting at the intersection of the Atlantic and Mississippi migration routes, each spring it welcomes more than 200 species, not to mention thousands of serious birders.

At the event, she was simultaneously treated as literary royalty – attenders queued nervously for a chance to speak to her and pose for photographs – and as Peggy, the no-nonsense islander who often spends months at her cottage there and is woven into the community of 235 full-time residents.

The new building expands the footprint of the Pelee Island Bird Observatory, which the couple co-founded more than two decades ago to study the transcontinental movement of birds. It is also a refuge from Atwood’s nemesis: chiggers.

“You don’t know about chiggers?” she says of the six-legged larval mites hiding in the grass around the building. “Once you learn about their bite – and the itching that never stops – you never forget.”

While Atwood was exposed to birds – and chiggers – during a youth spent in the Ontario hinterlands with her forest entomologist father, Gibson became a bird lover later in life, with the zeal of a born-again religious convert.

“At its heightened moments, birdwatching can encourage a state of being close to rapture,” he wrote in his book. “It is an ecstasy that is said to accompany the writing of poetry; sometimes it comes when we’re listening to music.”"

 The queen of dystopian futures is optimistic - I find that interesting.

"Atwood says the four biggest threats to birds – windows, cats, toxic pollution and environmental destruction of their habitats – are all things humans can help stop.

The first two are easier to address, but the latter are more challenging.

“People think: we can cut down this forest, and we’ll just make another forest over there. It’s not going to be the same. Birds have specific habitats that they need, so it’s not like spreading butter on a piece of toast.”

Atwood, who has spent much of her career imagining dystopian futures, is nonetheless optimistic about a future that has not yet been decided.

“Let’s say hope is a built-in human characteristic. Unless you’re deeply depressed, you wake up every morning thinking, what will this day bring? Maybe it will be a chocolate bar. Maybe there’ll be some surprises. If our ancestors didn’t have that, we probably wouldn’t be here,” she says."