Future birds

Over quite a long time I've painted birds: chickens, mythical feathered creatures, and, one of the first, a red feathered 'peacock goddess of the pomegranates' so enchanted was I with the fact that we had pomegranate trees growing in our at-that-time-new garden in the South of France. 

I'm probably in awe of birds above everything else on this planet. Just the way a wood pigeon heaves its considerable feathery weight into the air, or a tiny hummingbird flaps its micro wings at 4,000 beats a minutes. Wheeling swallows, plunging Cormorants, the garden robin landing with absolute precision on a branch of a pine tree. We are so solid and clumsy in comparison, our flying consisting of keening for the drinks trolly at 30,000 feet, or a few minutes hearty plummeting towards the Earth's crust under a hopefully-going-to-open parachute.

Feeling a need to have a break from my timed sketch paintings I looked at the 'hero sparrow' painting I had done in the summer - an ode to a male sparrow who had cheeped for a mate for four months - and thought, birds. Birds but with a story behind each one, future birds that might be moulded by environmental events. Obviously that's leaving out the thousands of years evolution element, but . . . who knows. Nothing much currently seems overly real . . .

Below, my first future bird: Picus Centrum Datorum, as painted by The Londonian Birdsmiith in 2097.

Appearing within the Unknown Times following the Final Curtain as a cross between the European Jay and climate driven arrival, Levaillant’s woodpecker, the Picus C D became an issue with deteriorating data center cladding and infestations of cable eating ants. 

The Picus having the beak impact of ten hand drills was able to enter the largely under-maintained structures in search of ants and residual heat from the dying computer systems. Most data harness centers have now a colony of many hundreds of Picus C D within them even though the heat has long ago dispursed. It is thought the birds will probably return to the trees once the forests have once again attained their planetary rightful place.