A Furious Wind (the plight of the passenger pigeon)

Featured in Antler Gallery’s annual BRINK group exhibit, January 2025.

I remember seeing an article about the Passenger Pigeon in an old issue of NatGeo when I was just 14. In the photos the specimens were meticulously arranged on a table, soft-bodied dominoes of rust and grey, fallen in neat rows. Their cotton-stuffed eyes made the birds seem more like toys than actual once-living beings. The gravity of the situation was lost on me as a child. Allured by the “edginess” of dead stuff as an angsty teen, I carefully cut around the images and used them to decorate my school notebooks and bedroom walls.

Even after years of college and work in conservation-adjacent fields hearing this extinction story ad infinitum, I still admit to feeling some of the same disconnect I did as a child. Although I *know* their story now, it is still difficult to grasp the enormous weight of this human-driven culling.

I grieve for the restless ghosts of extinct creatures we never got to meet.

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Words from Aldo Leopold:
“There will always be pigeons in books and in museums, but these are effigies and images, dead to all hardships and to all delights. Book-pigeons cannot dive out of a cloud to make the deer run for cover, or clap their wings in thunderous applause of mast-laden woods. Book-pigeons cannot breakfast on new-mown wheat in Minnesota, and dine on blueberries in Canada. They know no urge of seasons; they feel no kiss of sun, no lash of wind and weather.

They live forever by not living at all.”

Watercolor on cotton paper. 16″x 20″.