In the 1950s Meadows sculpted a series of birds, Running, Frightened, Fallen and Shot; he used their fragile frames to channel the feelings of threat, fear and suffering which afflicted his generation in the aftermath of the war. He said, “Birds can express a whole range of tragic emotion, they have a vulnerability which makes it easy to use them as vehicles for people”. In another text for his 1959 Gimpel Fils Gallery one-man show, he expanded, “To use non-human figures is for me at the present time less inhibiting; one is less conscious of what has gone before and is more free to take liberties with the form and to make direct statements than with the human figure: nevertheless they are essentially human...”