The winners of the Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Endangered Species Day Youth Art Contest are talented artists who know a charismatic endangered species when they see one. Just check out Anisha Kundu’s humpback whale:
Kevin Huo’s albatross:
MemoRee’ Plaisance’s jaguar:
And Hannah Chacko’s garter snake:
That last one is in the kindergarten through second grade category! At that age I was just glueing cotton balls to paper.
But it takes a special sort of artistic insight to find beauty in an insect that most would find repellant. Kindergartener (kindergartener!!!) Ava Bribiesco decided she wanted to depict American burying beetles — the weird carrion beetles that once scoured the continent for carcasses to embalm, bury, and feed to their young and that now live in only small areas of the Midwest:
She won the grand prize and our total respect.
