Missy Dunaway’s colorful illustrations combine natural history, folklore and literature to depict the Bard’s birds Partial view of  Eurasian blackbird , Missy Dunaway, acrylic ink on paper Courtesy of the artist Missy Dunaway’s idea to paint all of Shakespeare ’s birds first took flight in college after a chat with a friend. During the conversation, while trying to quantify the playwright’s talent, Dunaway noted that he’d coined or popularized many common phrases , and then she cited his broad knowledge of nature. “I said, ‘Just look at how many birds he mentions,’” Dunaway recalls. “And that’s just birds.” At the time, she was focused on other artistic projects, including studying textiles in Turkey on a Fulbright grant. But the imagery of the Bard’s birds stayed in the back of her mind. In 2021, after college, Dunaway returned to this vision and began her current project: “ The Birds of Shakespeare ,” a series of acrylic ink paintings depicting each bird in the playwright’s oeuvre.…