‘Did you know,” asks Es Devlin, “that you can tell the difference between a wood pigeon and a collared dove from how it emphasises the syllables in its call?” She is sitting at a long table in her home and studio in south London, where big glass doors open on to a leafy garden, as the cooing of a wood pigeon drifts in on the breeze. A nearby table is piled high with pencil drawings of birds, beetles, butterflies and bats, while further illustrations of animals are propped against the walls. It looks like the result of a particularly busy day in an RSPB classroom rather than the lair of a world-famous stage designer. “I’ve been drawing these nonstop for four months,” she says, with an air of exhaustion. “Sometimes for 18 hours a day. I haven’t been out. It’s literally all I’ve been doing.”
When the pandemic hit, and Devlin’s busy schedule of designing spectacular stadium shows was suddenly suspended, her mind turned to the wildlife in her own back yard. She had been working on elaborate stage designs for Beyoncé, Adele, and Cirque du Soleil, but suddenly found her world compressed to counting caterpillars and spotting bee hawk moths with her two children.
