Jessica Hamzelou, reporter
(Image: Ralph Steadman)
See more boids in our gallery: "Memories of extinct birds, real and imagined"
YOU will know the sad fate of the famous flightless dodo. And you might have heard the chilling story of how the last known pair of great auks met their untimely demise as a result of collectors' greed. Less familiar, perhaps, are the tales of the needless smut and the blue piddle.
Extinct Boids is a wonderful collection of drawings of birds that once lived on Earth, alongside some living only in the imagination. Last year, when film-maker Ceri Levy held an exhibition of artworks portraying extinct birds, he asked artist and political cartoonist Ralph Steadman to contribute a painting. "I was asked for one and I did a hundred," Steadman told New Scientist. He has been drawing birds ever since.
Every turn of the page reveals a bird brought to life in Steadman's inimitable style. Some are invented out of necessity - no one knows what the double-banded argus looked like, for instance, because all that remains is a single feather. Others are wholly imagined.
Accompanying each image is Levy's commentary, which describes how each bird met its eventual end. The made-up creatures are not excluded: there are humorous descriptions of their personalities, pastimes and the role they play on Toadstool Island - a place where Levy and Steadman imagine all the extinct and invented birds now live.
Levy and Steadman hope their book of birds - or boids - will introduce the idea of avian extinction to a new audience. Steadman says the project has changed him, making him something of a bird enthusiast. "I used to be rather balanced, but now I've become rather bird-like," he jokes.
Book Information
Extinct Boids by Ralph Steadman and Ceri Levy
Published by: Bloomsbury
?35/$50
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