Peacock Feathers Illegal

Peacock 6

Like the eagle in the United States, the blue peacock is the national bird of India. It follows then, that like the USA, India also made killing peacocks illegal. In the USA, you cannot have feathers from their national bird. But in India, you can have peacock feathers but only if they are naturally shed. To find out if a feather is naturally shed or if it was plucked from the skin of a bird, authorities simple place the shaft under a fairly low magnification to examine the base of the shaft. They also use their technology to perform a simple chemical test.

A very large down feather

The biggest, fluffiest down feathers that I know of grow under the tail of a male peacock. They stick out from the back of the male bird when it is displaying. Since in India where they are from, peacocks don’t have a lot of need to protect against cold, perhaps they use them for display? They are rather prominent, but only from the back-side. So why are they on the rear-end if the business side of the peacock display is the front? Unlike this down feather built around a long central shaft, the lightest of down has hardly any central shaft at all, just long fluffy barbs coming off a shaft so short that you can barely feel it when you roll the down between your fingers. For their size, these feathers are so light, they come close to defying gravity. Why then are they called “down” when perhaps a more fitting name would be “up”?

A bug in the works

Shelter 2

To make the background for this piece, I took apart, flattened, and pasted a big paper wasp nest. It was just finished and framed when I noticed a bug crawling around inside. Apparently, the paper had hid a little beetle living in a fold. The beetle chose to come out an hour after I had sealed up the entire piece. So now I have to take it apart, remove the beetle, and freeze the whole thing—which is what I should have done to the wasp nest in the first place like I do to all my feathers.

Feathers have bugs too, which are adapted for living and chewing on them. They have mites. And certain beetles can eat feathers. Fortunately, a few 48-hour, zero degree Fahrenheit chillings kills these tiny creatures, so I have never had a problem as long as the feathers are stored in a sealed place. I have two shadowboxes full of arranged and still perfect feathers that has been around for 25 years.

How is hair like feathers?

Janice Arnold and Chris Maynard collaboration.

Last week, Janice Arnold and I took down our trial installation combining her felt and my feathers. Because of this collaboration, I am thinking about keratin, the protein that makes hair, skin, claws, beaks and feathers. It also makes spider webs and the baleen of whales.

You can start to get an idea of the shared function of this material just by asking what keratin does that is the same for all these things, from skin to claws. Keratin provides toughness.

It provides toughness because its protein building blocks are long and complex. Claws, beaks, hair, and feathers look different for two reasons. One, keratin comes in dozens of varieties. And two, like the same kinds of bricks go into building different structures, so can the same variety of keratin build different structures.

Painting using a feather as a brush

Colin Woolf, Grouse

I am hugely attracted to Colin Woolf’s use of tiny pinfeathers as paint brushes. He will place one in a special handle to paint a watercolor image of the bird that the feather came from. Each bird has only one of these stiff tiny feathers on each wing. It is from the same place the tip of your thumb would be if you grew wings. It is actually one of three feathers that helps a bird navigate in slow flight, called an alula.

This is an old painting technique that Colin has revived from 200 years ago. He authored a book in 2012 about pin-feather painting and has a couple of five-minute YouTube videos describing the technique. His website also describes the technique and shows some of his painting.

I sent Colin a couple of ruffed grouse pinfeathers. From them he just finished this picture which I will feature prominently in my home once I get it framed.

Feathers float, twirl, and spin

When walking, if I find a feather I often bend over, pick it up, hold it high and let it loose to watch it spin, twirl, float, flutter, circle or otherwise make its way back to the ground. I love the way each feather shape elicits a different motion and I cannot always predict exactly what it will be. Daniel Wurtzel uses blowing air engineered to do amazing things to different materials including feathers. The feathers he uses here are wing flight feathers, which spin, shafts downward. Body feathers float and circle. Other feathers come down in different ways as air flow interrupts the pull of gravity.

Black and White

Silver Pheasant

After spending several years looking for matches for feathers, one black and the other white, I found several. These two are from the same species of pheasant, the silver pheasant. The black one is a subspecies called the Lewis pheasant.

Black and white is a powerful combination for an artist to work with because people attach strong meanings to these two opposites. Different peoples place different values on black and white. For instance, in southern Thailand where the black form of the silver pheasant lives, black is the usual choice for mourning and in China where a white form of the silver pheasant lives, white can be the choice. The birds just attend to their business, unencumbered with the values we place on whiteness and blackness.

A small cycle of life

Eat 2

I eat birds - well, chickens and turkeys. Someday, I expect, a bird will be pulling up and eating worms that have been feeding on parts of my long decomposed body. It is really quite remarkable the way organic life keeps reinventing itself.  It’s not morbid to me.

Life is precious, but it goes away, and there is a grace in letting it go. Hanging on through fame or lasting accomplishments seems a bit futile. My mother was a fairly well-known artist in her time. She died in 2008 and just six years later, except for a few collectors, no one knows her. The person with the longest lasting fame that I know of is that recently discovered fellow who fell in a Alps glacier 35,000 years ago. So if you want to be remembered a long time after your death…

This is my favorite piece, in part because it tells a fairly clear story. But that is not saying much because my favorites tend to be my latest. The one I am making now—of crows laced into an intricately carved large black feather—will probably become my favorite, until one I make after that.

How to make color from a feather

Turaco feather soluble

There is a kind of bird from Africa that you can make color from its feathers. I read on the internet that the Turaco's feather pigment is water soluble. It is hard to believe since this bird lives in tropical forests where I could just picture its feathers dripping red and green in a rainstorm. So I took one of their beautifully red-colored wing feathers (shed at a zoo) and put it in a glass of water to leave overnight. Actually, it wasn’t that simple because these (and most) feather surface structures repel water. This feather just popped up to float on the surface. So I squeezed and kneaded the feather until the surface tension broke and the water finally soaked into the feather.  Next morning I checked on the cup and found the water to be perfectly clear. Hmmmm. This feather’s red pigment is the only red feather color known to be copper based. The bird’s green pigment, also copper based, is the only know true green chemical pigment in birds—the greens of most birds being a combination of yellow carotene-type pigments and blue surface structures.

Then I added a small amount of dish soap to the cup and immediately red started coming out of the feather into the water. After about an hour, the feather turned a light grey color and the water looked like cherry juice. I did soak a green feather in soapy water but the green remained in the feather and the water clear. The next step is to evaporate most of the water and see if I can make a watercolor to use in a background for a shadowbox using these feathers.

What the Bird Eats

Eat 1 (detail)

Just like us, a bird’s body and feathers are assembled from what it eats. I find it a wondrous piece of the natural world that a wren can make feathers from digesting the bugs it eats just as our bodies can amass themselves from milk when we’re babies and later from food like rice and beans or burgers and fries.

Recently, I awoke at night with this as new and prolific topic for feather shadowboxes: birds and what they eat. I was excited and quickly sketched thirty or so before I made myself stop. I felt a pang of frustration because there are endless design possibilities for this theme but I could not possibly find enough time to make all but a small portion of them.

Lying in bed after my sketch fest, my amplified awareness of the assembling of life and disassembling at death cycle of eating was overwhelming and I needed to lie back down and breathe deeply to let these thoughts incorporate into my cells. Then I fell asleep for the rest of the night.

I want to see the colors that birds see

Common Merganser

A visual artist is often profoundly aware of the ways that colors enhance the beauty of the world.

As a human you have 3 kinds of cone receptors in your eyes allowing you to see the primary colors. A bird has 4! They can see ultraviolet and violet colors that we can’t. Plus their eyes are made in other ways different than ours which means they can see more subtle differences in the primary colors and the colors appear sharper, more vivid. It makes sense that feathers have adapted to birds’ visual abilities which means that for a bird, feathers show even more colors and patterns than we know.  So imagine my disappointment with my human eyes and desire to see like a bird when I learned more about what the world looks like to them.

A black and white feather such as this Merganser's may appear to a bird as a shimmering wonder of violets and blues. 

Beautiful Starlings

Starling Poster

I am fascinated with starlings in part because the only kind where I live was introduced, an immigrant. Since they are considered a pest by many, I tend to notice their beauty, especially the feathers. It is the nature of my perspective as an artist. Ours in North America aren’t the only starlings. As a matter of fact, over 100 species of them grace this world with their different voices, social behavior, and their feathers. I had the opportunity this week to photograph 20 species worth of their feathers. They range from 5 to 45 millimeters each in length and average about 25 millimeters which is about an inch long. The metallic feathers only reflect light from a single angle. In the final image, these feathers are at that angle, at their shiniest. Looking at them from any other direction, they look mostly grayish.  The image shows the feathers at their peak--like an outdoor magazine that only shows the biggest fish caught or a fashion advertisement showing an unattainably beautiful face.  But unlike the beautiful faces, the feathers here aren’t enhanced in photoshop.

Each feather was positioned and lit just right, photographed and then combined in what ended up in a file big enough to print a 10 foot image in fine detail.

Taking Care of Feathers

Preening Crow feather

What if birds had to shop for feather-care products like people shop for hair products? What a confusing array of choices they would have to confront! Thinking about the time I spend combing, washing, drying and fussing over the my head’s small patch of hair makes me more appreciative of the effort a bird goes through to keep the feathers in good shape all over its body.  No matter how vain I might be about my hair, feathers are infinitely more important to a bird than my hair is to me.

The swallows in my barn groom their feathers with their bills and sometimes with their feet, especially when they are shedding old feathers to make way for new ones growing in. They nibble every feather from its base upward to get them aligned just right. They dislodge small feathers as they shed. Then they take a break to shake dust and feathers loose. Often they take to the wing after a preening session and  give themselves a thorough shake while in mid-air, sending a plume of dust and feathers behind them.

Preening is the topic of a small series of feather shadowboxes I am making. This crow piece was the first; Macaws were next. A preening Kingfisher will follow.

Feather shadowboxes images for free?

Trumpeter Hornbill

An artist needs to eat too, so why did I just let Microsoft use twelve feather shadowbox images as their screensaver downloads free of charge? My mission here is to share my appreciation and excitement about life. I have chosen to do this through the complex, diverse and beautiful world of feathers. Screensavers images are a pretty good way to share since we stare at our electronic devices so much. And people do sometimes buy prints and originals from first having seen the images as screensavers.

So have at it: download the second series of a dozen screensavers (or the first series) for your PC computer or Android phone or tablet.

Mirrors

Phalarope in process

I seem to be making a series of feather shadowboxes with the theme of reflection. There’s the real thing, the real bird—and then there is its reflection. Like shadows, I tend to pay less attention to reflections but when I do, it’s a whole different and interesting world.  Then what I see is formed by the real bird and the little disturbances happening in its environment. It’s a story of wind and water and movement.  It’s like my thought process, another kind of reflecting—it depends on the state of my mind—the recent disturbances that affect what I’m thinking. Anyway, it is fun to play around with this in my art.

When finished and mounted, this piece will be entitled "Two Phalaropes." Phalaropes are birds that swim in tight circles twisting the water below them into a funnel that sucks small edible creatures up toward their eager beaks. The materials are two large Capercaillie tail feathers.

Camouflage, feathers, and fashion

Baby Grouse

Sitting very still, high in the Uinta mountains earlier this month, I watched a ruffed grouse slowly forage within a boot’s length of me. At first I stared at a spot 10 feet away under the juniper and aspen where an occasional rustle emerged. Nothing. Only when the grouse moved did I see it. Like a lot of birds that rely on feather patterns to hide, the decorations on each feather are interesting. But together on the bird, they create high-end concealment. If the makers of camouflage clothing for hunting and warfare took note of what birds wear, I would buy a jacket and pants in Ruffed Grouse.

Repeating Patterns 2

The Two Turkeys 2

Feathers on the bodies of birds overlap each other—just their tips show. Depending on the shape of the tips, they are seen on the bird as repeating diamond, triangle, or sometimes rectangle shapes. My art aims to honor both birds and their feathers but since I work with single feathers off the birds, this M.C. Escher-ish piece is a reconstruction and recognition of the patterned arrangements feathers make on birds .

This piece also tells a story of two separate but connected bird species. The first is of an American Turkey. The second is of the only other species of turkey there is: the Ocellated Turkey from Yucatan and parts of Central America.

An essential and important activity

We use our hands to scrub our skin and otherwise groom ourselves. Plus we have tools to help, like hairbrushes. Birds only have their beaks plus they have a lot more to take care than just skin—thousands of feathers. Without preening, the feathers would get dirtier by the day. They would not be able to repel water and would look ugly and dull as well. Without preening feathers barbs would come apart and stay apart and eventually the bird would not be able to fly. Mites would have the upper hand and eat the feathers starting with the down next to the bird’s skin. Feathers would clump together. The bird would be cold. So birds spend hours each day preening and they only have their bills to do it. I thought it interesting to film this Spoonbill preening because most birds use a pointed beak rather than a spoon-shaped one. The Spoonbill looks surprisingly efficient.

The longest flight

Godwit World

Last week I was returning 3000 miles from the east to the west coast of the United States, trying not to be bored on the 5-hour trip. Looking out on the wings of the plane I hoped that the metal skin was sturdy and the rivets secure.

With flight, distances have shrunk and the earth seems much smaller. Confined to my seat, I thought of birds like terns and godwits that migrate across the globe twice a year every year and have done so for eons. What does the world look like to them?

What does a bird experience on a self-propelled non-stop 7,000-mile, 200-hour trip from the Arctic to New Zealand with miles and miles of nothing but sea? Does it pray for its feathers to hold together, as I did for the wing of the airplane?

So I took out my sketch pad and drew a design for a new shadowbox; then back at the studio, rushed to work on it.

Bar-tailed Godwits live in and migrate from Asia, Europe, Africa, New Zealand, and Australia and not much in South and North America except Alaska. Cornell’s All About Birds describes in more detail the migration other facts about the Kuaka--what they call Bar-tailed Godwits in New Zealand. And yes, their feathers do look a bit worn after their long flights.

Where feathers came from and where they went

Dino feathers, clumped barbs

In 2011, a student at the University of Alberta found these feathers in fossil amber. They are 80 million years old and likely from dinosaurs.

You might assume that the first feathers were for flight but you’d probably be wrong. Flight feathers are incredibly complex. Like a single cabin rebuilt into a house, then into a town, and then a city, growing things begin simply and evolve into more complex forms. So it makes a lot more sense that the first feathers were simpler arrangements. The first feathers would likely be just individual shafts; then shafts with barbs--like branches coming from the shafts which is what is pictured here. After that, feather barbs would themselves branch by adding barbules coming off the branches. This is what we know as down—filamenty, whispy, and warm. Then barbules would add the little microscopic hooks on their ends to keep the barbs connected, sort of like Velcro. This would make a feather vane—the flat surface needed for flight. Only then would a feather evolve the further features needed for flight. So these feathers were used for something else—perhaps to aid swimming or to keep the creature warm.