Visible from the Oakland hills across the Bay and flanked by a thirty-mile stretch of turbulent ocean, Southeast Farallon Island is the westernmost point of the City of San Francisco.  Recovering from human intrusion, it is slowly reverting to pure wilderness and becoming one of the West Coast's most important marine mammal and seabird colonies.

Meadowsweet Dairy, in collaboration with the Point Reyes Bird Observatory, was awarded a Haas Creative Work Fund Grant in 1998 to do a site specific sculpture on Southeast Farallon Island.  It took us two years of planning, site visits and complicated logistical wrangling.  The project was hampered by the fact that access to the island is strictly limited by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and rough weather can make visiting (if you can get permission) impossible.  Less than a handfull of scientists live there during the year and only 8 people are allowed to stay overnight on the island at a time.  In addition we had to complete the project at a time when the seabird breeding season was over.  As the loading crane swung our crew up over the cliffs and onto the island it was  late August of 2000 and the final leg of our adventure had just begun.

A stainless steel frame was barged to the island and then lowered onto the site by helicopter.  We then used concrete rubble from the remains of an old building on the island and stacked it into a sculptural form around this structure to create nesting habitat for threatened burrowing sea birds.  Inside this mound of rubble is the stainless steel core which creates a tiny room (a bird blind) from which scientists can access 32 artificial nesting boxes.  Each box is adjustable and can be modified to accommodate a variety of birds such as Cassin's Auklets, Rhinoceros Auklets, Ashy Storm-Petrels and Pigeon Guillemots.  For the first time scientists will be able to study the nesting behavior of these birds from essentially inside their burrows. 

The finished work of art is for the birds, for the scientists and for all of us to consider the many interlocking ties and systems that connect us all.

2001 Update:  Nine Cassin's Auklets fledged from the nesting boxes inthe first year.

2002 Update: Both Cassin's Auklets and Pigeon Guillemots fledged chicks.