Embroidering the family-level avian tree of life

Each year for the American Ornithological Society (AOS) conference, the society holds a silent auction to support student research and travel to the conference. This year, I wanted to donate something that combined three of my favorite things: evolutionary biology, scientific-inspired art, and vector-editing software. The result was an embroidered version of one of my favorite recent scientific figures.

The inspiration came from the phylogeny published by Josefin Stiller and colleagues in their 2024 Nature paper, Complexity of avian evolution revealed by family-level genomes. Their study reconstructed the relationships and divergence times of 363 bird species using 63,430 intergenic loci, producing one of the most comprehensive family-level avian phylogenies to date. The figure beautifully illustrates the evolutionary relationships among the 12 major clades of modern birds.

For my embroidery, however, I wanted a single representative from each bird family. The original tree included multiple species from several families, so I downloaded the published tree and supplemental data and used the ape package in R to prune the phylogeny down to one species per family. I opened the tree in FigTree, plotted it as a radial phylogeny, exported it as a PDF, and refined the figure in Adobe Illustrator by recreating the colored clade bars and other graphical elements from the original publication.

With the digital figure complete, it was time to switch from software to pen.

I printed the phylogeny, transferred it onto fabric using a heat-erasable fabric pen, and carefully traced every branch. This turned out to be one of the most annoying parts of the entire project. Groups such as Afroaves and Otidimorphae contain relationships of tightly packed branching events that are difficult to distinguish even on paper—and even more difficult through a layer of fabric.

After matching embroidery thread colors as closely as possible to the original figure, I traded my pen for needle and thread to begin stitching.

The final embroidery contains a phylogeny of 214 bird families connected by 426 internal nodes. Although the embroidered branch lengths are an approximate, every branching relationship is accurate. I repeatedly cross-checked the topology against the digital tree as I worked, making sure every node was placed correctly over more than 30 hours of stitching. You can see the phylogeny I used as a guide here.

Adding the additional embroidered legend and clade labels brought the total time for the project to roughly 45 hours.

Unfortunately, disaster struck only minutes after I finished.

I accidentally destroyed the piece in my attempt to heat the fabric to erase the pen marks, leaving me just two weeks before the conference to start over from scratch. So the version donated to the AOS Silent Auction is actually the second complete embroidery of this phylogeny.

Including both attempts, I spent approximately 75 hours of evenings and weekends bringing this project to life. Over the course of that time, I embroidered during five flights, three bus trips, and for hours next to the campfire while camping in Idaho with my family.

And after all of that... I'll probably make a third one someday.

After spending that much time following every branch of the avian tree of life by hand, it seems only fair that I eventually get to keep one for my own office shelf.

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