Lexi Arritt likes birds.
Migratory birds, songbirds, local all-year-long birds.
She owns binoculars for bird watching, hikes birding trails and wears bird merch for fun.
The University of Idaho English student who earned a master’s degree in Spring 2026 wasn’t always a bird buff. But her six-year long enthusiasm to recognize the songs, silhouettes and learn the names of feathered creatures also prompted her to look for new ways to talk about birds.
Arritt is in the process of building a community birding web platform called Migratory Methods that will include narratives about the avian world, stories and poems, ornithological research, fly zone maps, bird identification, and a birder’s forum.
“I wanted to take what I learned in the English program and turn it into something practical that would be useable and seminal,” Arritt said. “And I want other people to care about birds.”
U of I’s Confluence Lab helped her vision unfold.
The Confluence Lab is an English Department program that brings together arts, humanities and science to study environmental issues with a focus on storytelling.
One of the objectives of the Confluence Lab is to translate scientific research into everyday language that is engaging and readable.
“I immersed myself in the research and will use the platform to tell people how amazing and cool bird research is,” Arritt said.
A public relations undergraduate for whom science once seemed inaccessible, Arritt’s introduction to ornithology came during the pandemic when she opted to be outside and started bird watching and identification as a hobby. A few years later at the Palouse Audubon Society she was introduced to bird science., interviewed researchers and learned that many of their findings were unknown to everyday people.
“One of the ornithologists introduced me to a study on how urban noise and noise pollution affect birds by making it hard for them to communicate and causes stress,” she said. “It can affect reproduction.”
She wanted to know if the findings were amplified to the public.
“I asked how do you get this information out there and get people interested,” Arritt recalls. “The researcher didn’t have an answer.”
I wanted to take what I learned in the English program and turn it into something practical that would be useable and seminal.
Lexi Arritt
Master’s student in English
Arritt realized her public relations background and what she learned about building narratives at the Confluence Lab was a good foundation for launching her project.
“At the Confluence Lab I assisted researchers with their work and thought about different ways to form narratives around that, that were not separate from science but an extension of it,” she said. “I realized that your work is strengthened if you’re able to narrate it effectively.”
Past projects at the Confluence lab include stories about wildfire through the eyes of people who have experienced it, the extinction of woodland caribou from the North Idaho border country as told through interviews with residents and a discourse on the social and ecological changes seen in the Frank Church Wilderness.
For Erin James, professor of English and one of the lab’s cofounders, Arritt’s project exemplifies goals of the lab.
“Our primary mission is to create room for the arts and the humanities in studying and responding to environmental issues that impact rural communities,” James said.
Arrit’s website and digital map project is a terrific demonstration of how stories can engage the nonscientific community and promote collaboration.
“These projects not only increase participation in environmental care and stewardship but also open up new insights into the experiences of those in our communities, human and non-human alike,” James said.
Lab projects can take years to complete, and it may take Arritt’s Wingspan project, which was conceived in Fall ’25, a while to take flight. She will work with undergraduate students in the Confluence Lab as part of her ongoing research.
Besides her role as graduate student, Arritt is the assistant director at SEM Communications (Strategic Enrollment Management Communications) in the Office of Admissions and Campus Visits.
She plans to continue her association with the Confluence Lab as she adds layers to Migratory Methods to make it a multi-dimensional birding site where visitors can learn about bird migration, add their own observations and generally be engaged with ornithology.
“It will be an interactive community brought together by science, observation and an investment in this fraternity that is made up of citizen scientists,” she said.