Elling Lien, an artist in St. John’s, Newfoundland, has created Junco’s Pub, a highly detailed dive bar that’s been impeccably scaled down as a bird feeder. Lien started live streaming from the pub on May 13, and in doing so he’s captured a few wonderful moments with the birds. Lien told BuzzFeed that this project is, in part, an homage to his father.
My dad, Jon Lien, was an animal behaviourist, a professor at MUN here in St. John’s. He was well-known for his work with whales, but really he started out doing research on wild birds. He’d love watching the juncos from our kitchen table at our house in Portugal Cove, and I was always amazed at how he seemed to be able to understand what was happening out there, how they were interacting with each other. Juncos are cantankerous little friggers, and dad really pointed that out to me first. It wasn’t just, “lah-dee-dah, I’m enjoying these wild birds, aren’t they so beautiful and free,” but he’d be really carefully keeping track of how they were interacting with each other. Sometimes he’d even take his students out to our house to watch and record the behaviour of these juncos and jays and chickadees. …Dad passed away five years ago, but as homage to him there’s a miniature version of a whale poster his Whale Research Group published in the corner of the pub.
image via Junco’s Pub
via BuzzFeed
