3 Billion Birds Gone is an encaustic mixed media sculpture in the shape of a broken egg. It is part of my ongoing series called “The Pale Blue Dot.” This work took most of the summer with hours upon hours spent building up the raised relief encaustic birds on the outside of the egg (see photo below.) The nest inside the egg was abandoned and contained no eggs. The chicken egg inside the nest is a Ukrainian-style egg designed and created using a wax resist method to dye each color. That alone took about 6 hours of work. Inside the egg is information about causes of the decline in the bird population as well as a quote by Jane Goodall, “What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.”
The partially melted birds on the outside of the blue egg represent the continuing disappearance of birds. In the past 50 years almost 3 billion breeding adult birds have disappeared from North America. That’s a 3 with 9 zeros (3,000,000,000). In 2025 the human population of the USA and Canada is 388,927,260 or, rounded up is 400 million. Human caused habitat loss is the biggest overall driver of bird declines followed by habitat degradation. Other typical reasons for bird loss include cats (kill more than 2.4 billion birds annually in the U.S.), pesticides which are toxic to birds, and collisions with windows. Common bird families including sparrows, warblers, finches, and swallows make up 90% of the loss. “If they’re in trouble, the wider web of life, including us, is in trouble too.” https://abcbirds.org/3-billion-birds/ 