Rosalie Winard

 

Wild Birds of Great Salt Lake

Great Salt Lake, a critically important oasis in the desert for the 5-7 millions of birds who travel through each year, is changing, putting the birds’ futures in doubt. The birds seem ageless, ancient in form and habit, following enduring migratory paths across the globe. As water levels shift, habitat encroachment continues and the toxicity of the water increases on the Great Salt Lake, the bountiful avian life remains in a perilous balance, the birds’ futures at risk.
Rosalie Winard will take us on a photographic tour of birds both on the Great Salt Lake and the birds’ “Linking Community” in San Blas, Mexico. She will also present a movie showing the banding of American White Pelican chicks on Gunnison Island.

Rosalie Winard is a photojournalist, artist and lecturer now based in Salt Lake City. With her camera, she has witnessed and documented avian adaptations to habitat encroachment and the sudden disappearance and re-emergence of bird colonies.Winard was originally drawn into an on-going and intimate relationship with birds as she studied ornithology and theology at New College in Florida, working on an NSF Student Originated Studies grant conducting a census of the bird populations on Florida’s spoil islands. Subsequently she spent hundreds of hours alone on a small mangrove island studying the threat and greeting displays of Brown Pelicans.

Tundra_Swans1979_16-2

Tundra Swans by Rosalie Winard

Her photographs have been published in Audubon, ArtForum, OnEarth, Time, The New York Times, The Lancet, Le Monde, Forbes, The Salt Lake Tribune, US News and World Report and been shown on 60 Minutes, NBC, PBS & BBC. She has been featured on Radio West and other NPR affiliates and has lectured at the American Museum of Natural History, the Natural History Museum of Utah, the Exploratorium in San Francisco, Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology, University of Utah, Weber State University, Westminster College, Mount Holyoke College, and in SLC public schools. Winard’s work is in the collections of the Library of Congress, Brooklyn Museum of Art, National Cowgirl Hall of Fame, Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, Natural History Museum of Utah, The New York Historical Society, Nelson Mandela, Oliver Sacks, Errol Morris and others. Her work on avian life has been published in an award winning book and exhibition WILD BIRDS OF THE AMERICAN WETLANDS, recently shown at the Natural History Museum of Utah. She is currently producing an archive of the birds of the Great Salt Lake for the Marriott Library at the University of Utah. You can see her work on YouTube.

 

Photograph of Rosalie Winard by Jaimi Butler