Muhlenberg College Biology Prof To Give Talk On Birds Of Armenia Exhibit
On Wednesday, November 17, 4:30 p.m., Dr. Daniel Klem, Jr., Sarkis Acopian Professor of Ornithology and Conservation Biology at Muhlenberg College, will give a talk in the Martin Art Gallery.Monday, October 25, 2004 01:00 PM
On Wednesday, November 17, 4:30 p.m., Dr. Daniel Klem, Jr., Sarkis Acopian Professor of Ornithology and Conservation Biology at Muhlenberg College, will give a talk in the Martin Art Gallery. His lecture will be based on the Gallery’s hosts Birds of Armenia show, which features more than two dozen full-color illustrations from the publication A Field Guide to the Birds of Armenia. This multi-disciplinary exhibition also offers avifauna sketching sessions in a simulated bird blind installed near the Gallery. The exhibition, gallery talk, and bird blind activities are free and open to the public.
The exhibition is a celebration of an international artistic and scientific collaboration that has strong historical roots from, and great future importance for, the people of Armenia. The exhibit will run until December 18, 2004.
Robert Gillmor, Jan Wilczur, Chris Rose, Norman Arlott, John Davis, and John Cox were among a dozen of Europe’s most respected bird illustrators chosen to create the artwork for this field guide. Collectively, they made hundreds of gouache and watercolor renderings that were consolidated and printed into 61 color plates that appear in the guide. This comprehensive publication was the result of four years of intense field, museum, and literature research and depicts all species of birds currently known to occur in Armenia.
Interestingly, bird illustrations play a long-standing role in Armenian art with a legacy of richly painted miniature birds on illuminated medieval manuscripts. Masters of Armenian bird miniatures showed extremely thorough knowledge of birds. So knowledgeable, in fact, that they developed bird forms into intricately shaped letters of the Armenian alphabet. The volumes of medieval manuscripts that depicted birds were a powerful stimulus to the development of the arts in Armenia through the 16th century.
A Field Guide to the Birds of Armenia was an integral part of the Birds of Armenia Project, an international effort to promote conservation awareness in Armenia after the fall of the Soviet Union. It was written by Dr. Martin S. Adamian, Armenian National Academy of Sciences, and Dr. Daniel Klem, Jr., Sarkis Acopian Professor of Ornithology & Conservation Biology at Muhlenberg College. They headed a technically skilled team of field, museum and editorial contributors from Armenia, Russia, United Kingdom, and the United States.
The driving force behind the Birds of Armenia Project was Sarkis Acopian. He is a local industrial engineer, founder of Acopian Technical Company, with a special interest in conservation. He was born in Tabriz, Iran. In 1945, he arrived in America, and after serving in the U. S. Air Corps, he earned an engineering degree from Lafayette College, and settled in the Lehigh Valley.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Acopian felt that the Republic of Armenia, a country about the size of the state of Maryland, needed to have accurate information about the importance of environmental conservation. Abundant natural resources were being drained and the environmental health of the country was deteriorating. It is widely documented that birds have a long-standing track record of forecasting environmental changes in Western countries and so Acopian felt that compiling a survey of Armenian birds would be a valid and useful conservation tool.
Throughout much of the 1990s work on the project proceeded, often overcoming tremendous logistical and technical obstacles. Finally, in 1997 A Field Guide to the Birds of Armenia was published by the American University of Armenia an affiliate of the University of California. The guide is considered to be a major contribution and reference to the international birding world, and is praised for “promoting awareness of the rich avifauna this little known Republic possesses, and for making Armenia’s birds accessible to all.”
