PRECARIOUS BIRDS

A minute for Martha

Martha, the last Passenger Pigeon, died in Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. In the decades before her death, Passenger Pigeons numbered in the billions. These 60 drawings are animated into a minute of silence, to remember the species we have lost and remind us that every act of conservation counts.

I have been drawing Martha since 2018. I have drawn her more than 100 times, mostly in a sketch book dedicated to her, which I started as an exercise in bearing witness to an extinct species. During the early, lockdown phase of Covid-19, the Martha sketchbook became a significant object in my life. Notes about my own uncertainty and frustration at a time of compounding ecological crises, my young son’s increasing curiosity about death, my partner’s redundancy all became annotations to the drawings of Martha. I have written about this process in both a co-authored journal article with Timo, and in my book Father Son and Other Animals.

Lost Species Day, 2023.

Zoe

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