Biodiversity Reclamation Suits for Urban Pigeons

Before embarking on a career in the arts, Laurel Roth Hope worked as both a park ranger and a natural resource conservator. Her time spent protecting and restoring habitats inspired a body of work that examines the adaptive abilities of some species versus others. 

In Biodiversity Reclamation Suits for Urban Pigeons, the artist crochets “sweaters” that mimic the plumage of extinct or endangered bird species. Despite their humor and charm, these works force us to confront the futility of recovering lost biodiversity. Roth Hope displays each suit on a hand-carved pigeon mannequin as a reminder that the animals we most take for granted, like the city pigeon, are often the ones most resilient and capable of surviving in a human-made environment.

The fact that birds are some of the most common wildlife in urban environments is striking. Their adaptability stands out. Some birds have been observed raising the pitch of their songs to cut through the urban noise, ensuring their melodies can still attract mates and defend territory. Peregrine Falcons utilize tall buildings as artificial cliffs for nesting. Pigeons, crows, and gulls are masters of scavenging for food. They’ve learned to exploit human food waste, becoming experts at finding sustenance in overflowing trash cans and discarded food scraps. The ubiquity of artificial light means that some species have started to forage for insects at night, extending their feeding hours. Urban birds also often become less fearful of humans, allowing them to move closer to potential food sources and nesting sites in busy areas. 

In her Meet the Artist video interview with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Roth Hope says, “With this series, I was trying to find a way to approach concepts of extinction but without beating people over the head with the idea too much. I think that both beauty and humor are ways to cross ideological divides and to communicate without having people close their minds down too quickly. I used crochet because it both has a really nice math to it—each row builds on the row before it—and it's very similar to the math you find in nature. Also, crochet has a long history of being used for comfort, for warmth, and for ornamentation, very much like feathers.”

“Birds have become a focus of my work for a few different reasons. I think morphologically, they’re very different from us, so you don’t associate yourself with them in the same way as you would with—you know, I also work with primates. There are a lot of different relationships between primates and man, and birds and man, and the way we use them as symbols. You know, birds have wings—they can fly, which is very symbolic for mankind—and they have beaks and lay eggs.”

“We don’t really associate ourselves with them, but at the same time, they are ecologically often associated with urban living. I think the three main bird species that are found in the cities, which are sparrows, starlings, and pigeons, are found in eighty percent of the cities worldwide.”

“They live with us on a different plane, but it’s not a very adversarial relationship in general. It’s a very interesting relationship, like they’ll build their houses just outside of our houses, and we don’t mind in the same way that we do with rats or raccoons or whatever other animals might be living in cities. So there’s a lot of room for looking at those relationships and symbols.”

“My background as a park ranger and natural resource management definitely influenced what I’m working on now because it sort of set me up not only looking for patterns of ecology and patterns of behavior in nature, which I kind of moved into urban environments, but also acting as a sort of intermediary between mankind and nature, trying to find ways that they can work together or where the patterns clash or how to smooth the patterns that work well together.”