Myfanwy MacLeod's giant replicas of a male and female English Sparrow reflect the community's focus on the environment and its desire to convey political and social meaning through public art. The Birds inhabits a newly built public plaza built on reclaimed industrial land in a LEED Gold community, fast tracked to serve as the Athlete's Village for the 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games. On the one hand, the birds provide whimsy and interest to an otherwise empty, hard-scaped public place.

On another, they evoke our ambiguous relationship to nature by calling attention to our manipulation of the environment species like the English Sparrow--introduced, non-native, and invasive--threaten the existing balance of nature and its biodiversity. The birds, like the birds in Alfred Hitchcock's famous film, physically embody and exteriorize unleashed and disturbing forces that threaten humanity. Their enormous size symbolically suggests their ubiquitous presence throughout North America, but also reverses the relationship between seemingly harmless small birds and humans, so that we are no longer the center of the universe. MacLeod writes: "My work for the Olympic Village tries to infuse the ordinary and commonplace sparrow with a touch of the ridiculous and the sublime.

The Birds is a pair of sparrows (male and a female) that, through their large scale (they stand 18 feet tall) invert the normal relationship existing between these typically small birds and the human population. Locating this artwork in an urban plaza highlights what has become the natural environment of the sparrow, and reinforces the small problem of introducing a foreign species and the subsequent havoc wreaked upon our ecosystems. The Birds reminds us of our past, but it aspires to challenge the future. It is my hope that the work stimulates understanding that will lead to a greater sense of shared responsibility and caring."