Martha, the last Passenger Pigeon, died in Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. In the decades before her death, Passenger Pigeons numbered in the billions; flocks of migrating pigeons darkened the sun for days at a time. Within two human generations, hunting and habitat destruction drove this species to extinction. These 60 drawings – sketched at my breakfast table over an 18-month period – are animated into a minute of silence, a meditation to mourn 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.
This work sits within the Precarious Birds project, and ongoing collaboration with Timo Rissanen. We have written about creating work in response to the extinction crisis, and how designers and artists might contribute to an Archive of Loss at a time of rapidly ecological change.