Capturing the Elusive White-bearded Antshrike—in Thread

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In early 2020, ornithologist Ana Luiza Catalano defended her doctoral thesis on birdsong at the Federal University of São Carlos in Brazil. A week later, the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to a grinding halt, and she soon found herself confined at home, living with her parents and brother. It was a shock to the system for someone whose work often took her into the field. To fill the hours indoors, she enrolled in an online embroidery course.

Although Catalano knew very little about embroidery, she was drawn to needle painting, a detailed style that uses colored threads the way other artists employ oils and watercolors. She chose a class in which the final project was—naturally—a bird. “I think birds are a really good thing to embroider,” she says. “The threads help to give it this feathery look.”

Once Catalano shared a photo of her first piece—a robin—online, her ornithologist friends immediately clamored for commissions. She started blending her new art form with her scientific background, embroidering realistic portraits of various species. Catalano created an Instagram account to share her work, using her art as a jumping-off point to talk about the birds she depicts. In a nod to her expertise on birdsong, she also stitched graphs to represent the species’ songs. Today, Catalano continues to do this art-science communication in her spare time while also getting back into the field as a biologist, studying whether mining affects birds’ acoustic communication.

For her Aviary creation, Catalano rendered the White-bearded Antshrike, a shy, rare species native to Argentina and Brazil. The striking forest dweller, which she’s never spotted or heard in the wild, is decreasing in number; its mature population is less than 10,000, and the species is classified as Vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. “It’s quite sad to think about,” Catalano says. “But I think to portray these birds is also a sort of contribution to make them seen, because they’re so hard to see.”

Catalano’s piece, made from embroidery floss on cotton fabric, is an idealized family portrait in which both the black-capped male and the rufous-headed female appear together—a sight that, to Catalano’s knowledge, has never been captured in the wild. “Even though the literature says that the parents are usually together, you can’t find a photo with both of them,” she says. Native bamboo vegetation—some fresh and green, some older and dying—crisscrosses the frame, giving the birds a place to perch and lending the piece structure. It’s symbolically significant, too, because the White-bearded Antshrike depends on the plant and is highly sensitive to forest degradation and destruction.

In the lower part of the frame, embroidered graphs illustrate the antshrike’s song in waveform (which shows how loud the sound is through time) and spectrogram (which shows the frequency, or pitch, as it rises and falls). The two lines of the spectrogram represent the overlapping layers of sound waves these birds give off. “They sing in harmonic, which means there are many frequencies,” Catalano explains. “It’s more similar to how we speak, instead of a more whistled sound.”

Catalano’s finished product is a gorgeous rendering of these vulnerable, shy birds and their song in the bamboo-rich forest they inhabit—and a reminder of the biodiversity at stake.

This piece originally ran in the Fall 2024 issue. To receive our print magazine, become a member by making a donation today.