Isa Cruz

Last Friday afternoon, over 50 bird enthusiasts flocked to the monthly Audubon Page-Turning. Hosted by the George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections and Archives since January 2016, the event draws a wide array of individuals across the Bowdoin and Brunswick communities, all seeking the same thrill: The revealing of a new bird species in the massive book “The Birds of America,” featuring the iconic illustrations of renowned American ornithologist John James Audubon.

Guest speakers—running the gamut from artists to researchers to students—offer a deeper engagement with the month’s bird. This month, poet-naturalist Samaa Abdurraqib offered insight into the Vesper sparrow. Abdurraqib described where the bird is typically located, how its name has shifted since Audubon’s time and the unique qualities of the Vesper sparrow.

“It’s so beautiful to see the image [of the bird] in person,” Abdurraqib said. “What I love looking at the image [is that] you can see the white tail feathers. That is a marking that is particular to this sparrow.”

Isa Cruz

Abdurraqib later played a recording of the Vesper sparrow’s song and, to finish the event, read the poem “Vesper Sparrows” by Deborah Digges. Like the poets she referenced in her talk, Abdurraqib found a particular connection between her work as a naturalist and a poet.

“I like to get people excited about birds,” Abdurraqib said in an interview with the Orient. “I just think that there’s something fascinating and interesting, and we can just really overlook them. They’re so charismatic.… Birds are inspiration as metaphor, [and] birds are inspiration as study for poetry.”

Marieke Van Der Steenhoven, the special collections education and engagement librarian, has been running the Audubon Page-Turning event for nearly ten years.

What began as monthly book spine upkeep for the preservation of “The Birds of America” blossomed into a community-centered event bringing together Bowdoin community members, Brunswick locals and naturalists from all over Maine.

“We used to have an alum before Covid who was coming up from Massachusetts every first Friday to join the page-turning,” Van Der Steenhoven said. “There’s a really devoted group of folks who come over and over and over again, which I think is an amazing community building event.”

The page-turning welcomes first-time viewers and devoted returners alike. After each event, Special Collections hands out pins themed around each month’s bird. Some attendees, like Senior Classroom Technology Engineer Michael DeLola, have been coming to the monthly page-flipping for years.

“As soon as I found out about it, I started coming here, and it actually is what got me into birds. I wasn’t even into birds until I watched the bird being flipped. And I wasn’t even into photography until I came here, either. So basically, most of my naturalist tendencies can be sourced back to the flipping of the bird,” DeLola said.

When choosing speakers, Van Der Steenhoven found it important to pull from a range of voices, from women of color like Abdurraqib to the upcoming student speaker, ornithologist and Bowdoin Naturalists leader Dylan Berr ’26.

Audubon himself was a slaveholder, and in continuing this page-turning tradition, Van Der Steenhoven emphasized the importance of confronting all parts of Audubon’s legacy.

“It is also really important to me to highlight all different types of voices,” Van Der Steenhoven said. “[That’s] why I think it’s really important to have student speakers as well as professional ornithologists too.… I also think it’s especially important because Audubon has a complicated history.”

To Van Der Steenhoven, this monthly event holds multitudes: confronting the complex histories of American ecology, opening up Special Collections to the broader public and building a larger community around naturalism.

“It sounds really ambitious,” Van Der Steenhoven said. “But it’s amazing because it’s anywhere from 20 to … 75 people crammed into the reading room, which is wild.”

Brunswick community member Carol Kalajainen praised the depth of this monthly tradition.

“It’s just so much fun,” Kalajainen said. “It’s really amazing to see how many topics you can cover through the lens of a book like this: birding, poetry, printing, history, the history of naturalism in the US, the need for attention to the environment, the changing environments in which these birds live.”