Conservation Note
Ceri Levy and the Ghosts of Gone Birds
An art exhibition about extinct birds, raising money for BirdLife's Preventing Extinctions Programme and reaching people conservation reporting does not.
Ceri Levy is a documentary-maker, writer and art collector, and a BirdLife Species Champion. Ghosts of Gone Birds was the exhibition he organised: artists commissioned to make work about extinct bird species, shown together, raising funds for BirdLife International’s Preventing Extinctions Programme.
The premise is more interesting than a charity exhibition usually is. Extinct species are difficult subjects for conservation communication because there is nothing left to photograph and nothing left to save: the argument has already been lost, which makes them easy to treat as history rather than as evidence. Commissioning artists to imagine them puts the birds back in front of people as individual animals rather than as entries on a list.
It also reaches a different audience. An exhibition in a gallery is attended by people who would not read a conservation report, and the species involved (Great Auk, Passenger Pigeon, Huia and the rest) carry a resonance that a declining but extant species does not.
The proceeds went to the Preventing Extinctions Programme, which works on species that are still here, which is the point of using the ones that are not.