The work was part of a larger collaborative project with filmmaker Ceri Levy, called The Ghosts of Gone Birds, in which well-known artists depicted now-extinct bird species such as the dodo and great auk. Levy asked Steadman to draw a single bird, but Steadman ended up illustrating more than 100. Those illustrations have been collected in a book just published by Bloomsbury called Extinct Boids.

And "boids" they are: The illustrations themselves are not scientifically accurate, and a couple of them never even existed (the "nasty tern" or the "jail bird," for example). But that hardly matters: this isn't supposed to be a guidebook to extinct species. It's one artist's view of birds, their spirits and personalities and their place in our collective imaginations.