First published in The Guardian

The snipe, barn owl and great bustard have appeared on walls around the capital. Caspar Henderson talks to the artist who is capturing the birds that are vanishing from Britain

Natural markings … ATM's grey partridge adorns a housing estate wall. Photographs: Caspar Henderson

More than a few artists have been moved to produce work that speaks to a long history of humans as the "overkillers" of other species – a record that appears to be culminating in a mass-extinction event at least as great as the one that killed the dinosaurs. Maya Lin's remarkable ongoing project What is Missing? allows anyone with an internet connection to view the abundance of rich and strange life forms that once existed in places where now there are concrete, cars and monoculture, and to reimagine the lives of strange and wonderful animals, from the dodo and steller's sea cow to the passenger pigeon and the Tasmanian wolf. A volume titled Ghosts of Gone Birds reproduces paintings by well-known artists of the diverse and astonishing birds that humans have eliminated in the last few centuries, from the red-moustached fruit dove and the snail-eating coua to the laughing owl.

For the most part, however, such works exist away from everyday life in the rareified air of the art world. The same cannot be said for the street art of ATM, a London-based artist whose paintings of rare and endangered British birds are appearing without warning on concrete fascias of decaying housing estates, brick walls, railway arches and unglamorous spots around the capital. In these works, the snipe, the barn owl, the great bustard and the bittern loom suddenly between junction boxes, ventilator grids and plastic bins. Typically between two and three metres high, and depicted with their subtle natural markings, they seem like giant projections from the collective memory of places now hidden beneath the roar of the city.

ATM grew up in a mill town in northern England and went to art college in Sheffield. As a child, he used to wander not far from town in steep-sided valleys that were thickly wooded and lined with streams and ponds. Insects, amphibians and above all birds were abundant. "Birds have always meant a lot to me," he says. "I have loved their songs since I was very young. They are also incredibly beautiful. It's their balance and co‑ordination, their markings. I also love birds because I love the wild places where they live, and I associate the two with each other." He discovered and grew to love the work of the great 19th-century illustrators – among them John James Audubon and John Gould – but when as a student he painted birds, the common response was ridicule.

After college, ATM moved through a series of squats in south London, his painting inspired by two passions: ancient Greek and Roman myths, and their representations by great painters in the European tradition such as Titian. Myths, he says, shed light on the darker forces in human nature. "In myths the unwitting acts of human beings are severely punished by the gods. This speaks to the way we live. The wiser counsel is often ignored; we pretend the environmental side-effects are not really happening. We see progress on one level, but at a hidden level the opposite is going on." The warning signs, he believes, are there for those who care to notice in the loss of the profusion of wildlife he knew as a child. Once-common species such as lapwings, yellow wagtails, skylarks and kestrels have declined in numbers.

His first street-painting was of a snipe, a medium-sized wading bird with a long straight bill which is abundant in the north and south-west of the British isles, but whose numbers have dwindled in lowland wet grassland of the south-east. The painting was part of a project by Acton Community Forum to bring art to the bleak South Acton Estate, but, for ATM, it was also an attempt to return the spirit of the bird to a part of suburban west London that was once marshland. It is one of his favourite species. "The male makes display flight when the sun is gone but there is still light in the sky," he says. "It produces a strange drumming sound as the wind passes through its tail feathers and then drops down silently into the marsh." The snipe was followed by murals of a partridge and a barn owl. All of these birds, he explains, would have thrived in the area.

In 2014, he started painting street art in east London, completing a three‑metre tall image of a great bustard on a black-painted brick wall off the Whitechapel Road. The name "bustard" may trigger a cheap laugh but this is a remarkable bird, one of the heaviest capable of flight, and splendid in its extravagant display feathers. Great bustards were driven to extinction in England in the early 19th century and are now being slowly reintroduced. ATM's most recent painting, just completed in Bethnal Green, is of a bittern. Once common in the reed beds of East Anglia, bitterns are now extremely rare, and the few that do live on these islands are almost impossible to spot. They have one of the loudest cries of any bird, a boom that haunts all who hear it.