In the summer of 2010 I spent a week of holidays working as a volunteer in a bird shelter. It was an amazing experience which connected with a lot of things going through my head in that period. I sketched the basic ideas for this painting while returning home.
The girl is a Griffon vulture, a species which can live up to about 40 years in captivity, and the figurines around the girl’s neck are a small subset of the species which have gone extinct in the 40 years before (data from http://extinctanimals.petermaas.nl/ ). Starting from upper left they are:
- Baiji (aka Yangtze River Dolphin)
- Aldabra Warbler
- Po’o-uli
- Nukupu’u
- Christmas Island Pipistrelle
- Conondale Gastric-brooding Frog
- Partula snails in general (more than 50 species wiped out at once, one of the saddest episodes in the history of biology)
- Aldabra Banded Snail
- Alaotra Grebe
I strived to make them as recognizable as possible. The one at the top (the warbler) is represented belly-up, because for many of the animals listed on the site all the references I could find were photos of specimens preserved in museums.