Extinct Boids

Readers who attended the Ghosts of Gone Birds exhibition in London (this enthralling display is now in Brighton until the end of the month) will remember an entire room dedicated to Ralph Steadman’s half-imagined, half-reimagined tribute to the bird species we have lost, replete with binoculars to examine those pictures higher up the walls.

Limited bird knowledge has liberated Steadman from staid factual accuracy, and unfettered his imagination while painting each species, making every violently daubed image a visceral and heartfelt paean to the variety and beauty of the nature we have destroyed in our brief abusive tenancy of this planet.

The book contains 100 full colour paintings (one per page at 35x24 cm) – Steadman was only supposed to paint one, but got thrillingly carried away – and does their anarchic impact justice. Steadman’s own wry and off-the-wall comments caption each, and commentary by Ceri Levy, who curated the exhibition, keeps the book on track with a diary of the project as the paintings emerged from the artist’s studio.

All the works within these pages are striking and engaging, and aesthetically inclined birders and non-birders alike should find much to amuse them. Try the made-up Channel-beaked Murdoch Cuckoo – “the first to spread news on the island” – and Lesser Peruvian Blue-beaked Blotswerve, the possibly-never-existed Double-banded Argus, or the genuinely real-but-extinct Liverpool Pigeon, known from just one specimen.

Despite its superficial flippancy, the book leaves you with joint feelings of genuine loss, enthusiasm for nature’s vibrancy and a tangible excitement at the rush of artistic inspiration within.

• Extinct Boids by Ralph Steadman and Ceri Levy (Bloomsbury, London, 2012).
• 240 pages, 114 colour illustrations, eight photographs.
• ISBN: 9781408178621. Hbk, £35. Birdwatch Bookshop from £31.99.