Passenger Pigeons were once so numerous that European settlers reported 'dusks lasting for days' as the birds migrated over New York.[1] Over the course of two human generations, overhunting and habitat destruction drove the species extinct. Martha, the last passenger pigeon, died in an enclosure at Cincinnati Zoo at 1pm, 1 September 1914.[2]
A century later, I received a card by post. Cross-stitched in Prussian blue thread: ‘I told my class of passenger pigeons. Blank faces. Five billion birds, all forgotten.’ Timo Rissanen crafted and sent the card from NYC, a prompt for me to delve into Martha's story as part of our Precarious Birds collaboration, in which we ‘stay with the trouble’ of the extinction crisis, one bird at a time. We select birds categorised from critically endangered to extinct to respond to, through deliberately slow creative processes: repetitive sketching, cross-stitch, collage and creative nonfiction writing.[3] At a time of overlapping environmental crises, Donna Haraway urges us:
to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.[4]
Our acts of paying close attention to the precarious circumstances of other animals holds Timo and I in the present, providing time and space to consider the troubling impacts of human entanglement in the more-than-human world.
Since 2019, I have drawn Martha more than one hundred times from two dull photographs, over my morning coffee, in a sketchbook stashed under the kitchen table. I set aside sixty seconds a day to enact this ritual. This visual essay explores how notebooks can be tools for bearing witness to an extinct species: recording not just what we observe and learn through research and reflective practice, but how we are changed through this process. Three notebooks, kept between 2019–2024, record different ways of bearing witness to Martha.
Zoë Sadokierski, seventy-two drawings from the Martha Book, 2019 – 2022, various drawing implements on paper, 165 x 200 mm. Image courtesy of the artist.
My son Raphael, then four years old, became fascinated by Martha's death and my drawing practice:
4 January 2020: Mum, why did they shoot Martha, why did they kill her family? 22 April 2020: Was she killed after the dinosaurs? Were we alive? Why did people kill all of Martha's family? Why?
His fascination with death was tangled up with the pervasive threat of COVID-19. After months of passive observation, Raph started painting over my drawings. I found myself possessive over the Martha book although his scribbles improved my hasty sketches. When he painted over my drawing with red acrylic one morning, I had to leave the room. Soon after, I gave him his own notebook, in which he chose to draw dragons instead of birds. For a spell, we drew together at breakfast: my happiest memory of lockdown. .
In 2024 I flew to Washington D.C. to visit Martha in her incarnation as a taxidermy mount — the closest approximation to 'fieldwork' with a lost species. Promoted as the last living individual of her species, Martha made international headlines and drew crowds at Cincinnati Zoo; a poster-bird for anthropogenic extinction. Immediately after her death, Martha was frozen in a 140kg block of ice and sent by express train to the Smithsonian Institute, where her remains were prepared as an anatomical specimen for ongoing scientific study and a taxidermy mount for occasional public display in the National Museum of Natural History. Since 2017, Martha has been featured in the Objects of Wonder exhibition. It was due to close in April 2025, but then unexpectedly shut five months early; the day before I arrived. I flew twenty-six hours to see a dead bird I had been drawing for six years, only to arrive one day too late.
I waved down a man on the other side of the glass and babbled my story at him. He explained that the diversity of artefacts in Objects of Wonder required specialists from across the Smithsonian to deinstall, and this was the only time all necessary staff were on site. With a shrug he said: ‘come on then, we don't want to disappoint her, if you've come all this way.’
And he led me into the dark, quiet room, alone with Martha.
This first visit was supposed to be scoping, to figure out how to set up for two days of observational drawing. All I had was an iPhone and the pens and notebook rattling around in my bag. After twenty minutes of reverential documentation, he returned and gently said ‘that's it now, I need to be somewhere else.’[5]
The fieldwork notebook documents the obstacles to witnessing itself: the institutional and practical barriers that obstruct observation of what we've lost. The rough urgency of these sketches reveals not just Martha's form from more angles than a static photograph affords, but my desperate attempt to capture her before she disappeared again into climate–controlled storage.
Back home, looking over the reference photographs, I realised in the drama of the encounter, I didn't notice the Mountain Ape skull looming large behind Martha. Sharing a frame, the skull and taxidermy mount create a kind of vanitas, a genre of still life art that uses symbolic objects to represent the fleeting nature of life and inevitability of death. Then I found myself in the frame too, my reflection superimposed over Martha, an accidental double exposure of witness and witnessed. This serendipitous image sums up everything I have been trying to do: to write myself into Martha's story, to breathe life back into a lost species. Although Martha has been dead for over a century, she continues to exist in relationship with those who seek her out.
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Zoë Sadokierski is a designer and writer based at the UTS School of Design. Her book Father, Son and Other Animals (Cordite, 2024) explores climate change and species extinction through the lenses of parenting and creative practice; it’s funnier than it sounds.
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[1]Joel Greenberg, A Feathered River Across the Sky: The Passenger Pigeon’s Flight to Extinction, Bloomsbury, London, 2014.
[2] ‘Martha, the Last Passenger Pigeon’, National Museum of Natural History,naturalhistory.si.edu/research/vertebrate-zoology/birds/collections-overview/martha-last-passenger-pigeon/ (sccessed 27 July 2025).
[3] We choose birds from the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species: www.iucnredlist.org. For more on the Precarious Birds project see: precariousbirds.net/
[4] Donna Haraway, Staying With the Trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, Durnham, 2016, p.1.
[5] I later realised this generous man was Michael Lawrence, Director for Exhibitions at the National Museum of Natural History. He undoubtedly had many other places to be.