The Unfeathered Bird

Katrina von Grouw.

The defining characteristic of birds is their feathers. I like to learn everything I can about them. But now I am reading and looking at the drawings in “The Unfeathered Bird” by Katrina van Gruow. The author shows everything about the physical structures of birds—without feathers. So reading it, I take the opportunity during these dark winter days to explore underneath feathers. Delving through this book, I am discovering how birds have many little ways to help their bodies fly. Looking at it this way, feathers are one of a thousand flight adjustments birds have made like:

● hollow bones ● beaks which eliminate heavy teeth ● double-capacity lungs ● muscles to pull wings up and muscles to pull them down ● a wishbone and a breastbone to support huge flight muscles   ●  a rigid body compensated by a long and flexible neck ● huge eyes which see differently than ours.

Local Eats

Bird Berry 4.

I treasure the variety of wondrous foods that are easily available to me. All I have to do is go to the supermarket and in a seemingly magical way, I can taste bananas from Honduras and chow down on baked cakes with wheat from the Palouse, sugar from Barbados, and eggs from chickens fed corn from Iowa. I can have a variety of sodas with many who-knows-what ingredients from who-knows-where. I don’t have to know anything about where the food comes from, how it is raised, or how it gets here. I just buy and eat.

But appreciating and understanding where food comes from gives me a good feeling of connection.

So when I look at birds foraging, I feel a bit of a longing for local eats. I have been watching and admiring the way the local songbirds find their simple meals. The robins pull worms from the earth, the chickadees investigate every crevice in the trees for insects, and the cedar waxwings gobble the bushes’ winter berries.

The feather used in this piece is not from a local bird but is from a South American amazon parrot kept in a nearby aviary. The red in the feather was perfect for portraying berries the cedar waxwings were feasting on next to my house.

Flying off to Miami

Liftoff 2.

This is Art Basel week and my Miami dealer, Pablo Donna, has a booth at the Miami Art Fair. So that is where I flew. This is an opportunity for galleries and collectors around the world to meet, to show and buy art. It is one of our biggest art shows.

My mother’s side of the family is from the area; it is where she grew up. So I will meet with some of my interesting relatives and visit the old family homes.  I also plan to hit the swamps and beaches to get inspiration for birds that live here, like spoonbills and ibises, skimmers and gallinules.

Turkey Time

Turkey Tails Feather Fan.

This year for the first time, turkeys graced my field. I got these heritage turkeys from a friend who selectively bred them for their beautiful feathers.  I quickly became enamored with the birds themselves, not just their feathers.  They pretty much raised themselves. My small flock was given free range, though I clipped their wing feathers so I guess they weren’t entirely free. Nevertheless, they could hop the fence from my field into my neighbor’s. Which is what happened when my neighbor’s Chihuahua grabbed one. The bird was fine but this taught the flock to stick closer to home.

The big Tom turkey strutted around, always showing off his tail feathers. I like to use them in my art but I knew that by the time he shed his, they would be ratty and useless for me. I’d heard that if you pull fresh, fully grown feathers, that the bird will regrow them. But I was loath to do it as this bird was trusting, kind of like a friend. But after consulting several people, I reluctantly decided to do it. After grabbing the bird (as he walked right up to me) I began to pull his tail feathers. He didn’t flinch or seem to be in pain and the feathers came out smoothly and easily. He still walks up to me but seems to be a bit embarrassed having no tail to strut, even though he still tries.

One million species of birds

Archaeopteryx feather.

Many kinds of birds have come and gone since the iconic archaeopteryx, 150 million years ago.

From a passage in Birds of the World (1961 Golden Press), Pierce Brodkorb estimated that based on the fossil record at that time that there have been between one and one and a half million species of birds since archaeopteryx. That seemed like a lot, so I checked on more recent estimates using statistics based on studies of the fossil record plus a lot of assumptions the scientists made. The estimates vary from 150 thousand to 1.5 million birds that have ever lived. Whatever the number of birds that have ever existed, there were a lot more birds that used to exist than the ten thousand-ish that exist today. Richard Pimm (who made one of the lowest estimate of total bird species) says that without humans, one species is thought, on average, to have gone extinct every 1000 years. Recently, with humans of course, it is a lot more.

Besides being sad over how much faster extinctions are happening at our hand, I come away from this with an amazement for how many different kinds of birds there were. I imagine, how many different patterns, shapes, and colors of feathers there have been which we will never know but can only try to imagine.

Paleo Owl

Paleo Owl.

I welcome the darker and colder and wetter seasons because, I tend to spend more time inside without feeling the pull of the warm sun drawing me to explore the natural world. I get to work on art. The themes of my winter pieces will sometimes edge away from portraying certain kinds of birds and their behaviors and more toward the meanings associated with feathers and flight.This is a piece I made last winter. If I lived in a cave, a fire would light the walls, casting upward shadows. I made the piece specifically for this kind of shadow. Because it needs to be lit from below, it has not left my studio. A home or gallery is almost always lit from above, so it would have to have special lighting for this piece.  Now that I think of it though, some upward lighting would feel kind of cozy on a cold winter night.

My inspiration was from a petroglyph that you can go see in Columbia Hills State Park on the Washington State side of the Columbia River.  I took the liberty of stylizing an image to adapt it to feather cutting.

Petroglyph in Columbia Hills State Park, Washington.

Deceived by Blackbirds

Blackbirds 6.

Red-wing blackbirds mislead us. On one hand, their noisy and busy behavior in the cattails during mating season seems directed at keeping other males away from each of their small aggressively defended territories. Males have many female mates. But here is the curious thing that I read on the Cornell Lab of Ornithology web site: up to half of the baby birds have a different father. I think that something else is happening in those cattails than males trying to keep a harem of females for themselves. Either the males are spectacularly unsuccessful at defending their territory or something else is going on. Perhaps a hint is found in the bird’s fall and winter behavior. All the males gather together in large same-sex flocks, spending most of the year with each other, eating and sleeping together. Maybe they are a bit more cooperative during breeding season too? Or maybe the females are controlling the shots despite all the noisy male behavior.

Redwing Blackbirds

Redwinged blackbirds, 14" x 32".

Blackbirds continue to inspire me. It is the time of year. Having eaten all seeds off the sunflowers, they continue to raid the goose feed. They don’t take a lot and I don’t mind because I get to watch them. Three kinds have come: brewer’s, redwing, and one solitary yellow headed, which is rare around here. It is the flocks of the male redwing blackbirds that most attract my attention, because of their bright red and yellow-feathered “shields”—their showy shoulder patches. My attraction seems natural because after all, their bright feathers are meant to be seen. But how to incorporate their patches of bright red into a feather composition? When all I have to work with are naturally colored feathers, I thought to either scatter random small red feathers in a piece or do what I did here; use a single naturally reddish feather shed from a turaco to be the symbolic shoulder patch emissary.

Large Blackbird Art

Blackbird Rain, 40"x60".

Blackbird Melodies.

As promised two weeks ago, here are images of two five-foot wide pieces, both of blackbirds. They will be shown as part of Art Basel week (December 1-6) at NOW Contemporary Art’s booth in Art Miami.

For Blackbird Rain, I used only shed feathers collected from one wing of a heritage turkey. It took four years to collect enough. For Blackbird Melodies, I used flight feathers from several crowned cranes that molted them last year. I combined these large feathers with small blue and green parakeet body feathers. Usually, no one besides me is obsessed enough or makes time to pick up small body feathers like these as they are shed.  The blue ones were collected by a woman who got a parakeet companion after her husband died. She picked up every feather the parakeet shed for 22 years—and gave them to me.

Large Pieces Almost Finished: Blackbirds

Blackbird Rain.

The sunflowers in my garden are maturing. Soon flocks of redwing blackbirds will swoop in for a feast. In anticipation, two of my largest pieces are being made—each is five feet long. Making a small piece involves cutting a single feather or two or three to make a completed picture. For a large piece such as this, the work becomes more compositional with many more feathers needed to complete the space.  A painter has the advantage of placing any size, color, shape, or width of line on their canvas. A feather’s natural shape, form, and color are my only ways of making a unified picture.

Both blackbird pieces will be in the Miami Art Basel show this December through NOW Contemporary Art. I will post pictures of them on this blog in two weeks when they are complete.

Sheddings

Shed feathers.

All over my field, my geese are shedding their feathers after wearing them for a year. We also shed our covering--our skin. Instead of a yearly molt, we shed our outer skin constantly, so much that our entire outer skin is replaced about once a month. Another characteristic our skin shares with feathers is that each is made of the same kind of protein—keratin. Reading a 2010 National Geographic article on skin , I found that like my field is full of shed feathers, my house is full of my shed skin cells. I shed about eight pounds a year which becomes most of the dust in the corners, on top of the refrigerator, and on my computer screen. Eeeeew.

Gaps Between the World and Us

Turkey Resurgence.

An artist’s job is to create bridges between how the world actually is and how we experience it. An artist help us to see and experience the world from a different angle—whether it is emotional, conceptual, or just seeing things differently from how our brains are used to—like M.C. Escher does so well. It helps us not get too stuck in one way of seeing things. It allows us to be more flexible and adaptable.  

That’s one of two reasons I like Escher. The other is that feathers are arranged on birds in ways that are prominent in Escher’s drawing: they overlap into repeating diamond patterns that take up all the space on the bird’s body.

Escher Bird Fish.

The Red Feather

Eclectus white.

I’m Caucasian. My skin is not pure white—that would be weird—but I can make my relatively whitish skin turn a bit orange when I drink a lot of carrot juice. Similarly, a male cardinal has to eat a lot of the right seeds and fruits to keep its feathers red all year.  The same class of chemicals that make my skin turn orange, carotenoids, make the red in the cardinal’s feathers. Carotenoids are a class of pigments that gets its name from carrots. The red in the feathers last for the life of the feathers, about a year; and the orange in my skin, thankfully, only lasts a day.

 This feather is from an eclectus parrot, a bird that also gets its red color from the food it eats.

More Swallows

Swallow Bug.

My home is a swallow haven. The tree and violet-green swallows get bird houses on the top of long poles in the field. Barn swallows get the barn. I supply them with feathers for their nests and in return, they swoop around snapping up mosquitoes and other insects. These birds, plus the bats that nest in my barn, seem to eat all the mosquitoes because I never see any mosquitoes near my house. A barn swallow, I read, was calculated to fly 600 miles a day and snap up a bug a minute.

When I watch one of these birds dart aside to get an insect, I hear its mouth snap shut when it captures one. But I never have actually seen a swallow actually catch a bug, just heard the "snap". When the swallows are about and I focus on a flying insect, waiting to see a swallow grab it, the bug always flies out of my sight, unharmed.

So I made this 20 by 30 inch piece of swallows catching bugs, using two mute swan feathers. With the white on white, it is hard to see the insect cutouts, just like it's hard to see the real bugs the swallows catch. But with a direct light, intense shadows form, bringing the outlines of the bugs into sharp focus.

Running into trouble with feather color

Trouble with feather colors.

I ran into some trouble trying to portray a mockingbird singing. Because they “mock” many bird songs, I wanted to show it “singing” a lot of colored feathers. Scientists have recorded a mocking bird singing 180 different songs, one after another without repeating a single one. I ran into difficulty finding the right colors to finish the piece. Frankly, I don’t often think deeply about color theory because feather colors are quite limited. For help, I called my artist professor friend, Susan Aurand, who is a whiz with colors. I provided her with a choice of different colored small feathers. When she saw this piece that I had made, it was almost like she had a paintbrush in her hand, the way she gently placed small, orange, yellow, and red feathers in different places, bringing out the blues and purples. Thank you, Susan! I am going to go back and read my color theory book—it’s buried around here somewhere.

Hearing: an Owl Story

A short drive from my home is a beautiful prairie full of wildflowers this time of year. After doing errands and computer work all day, I was happy to finally drive there, but it was already early evening.  As I walked on the paths, a moonless dark set in and I was a half mile from the parking lot. This is not a place where people walk at night, probably ever; especially without a flashlight. Nor are there any nearby roads or houses to provide any light. Feeling my way with my feet while looking up at the starry night, I must have appeared strange to any creatures who lived there. Especially the owls. Suddenly, their screeches combined with fleeting glimpses of their silhouettes close over my head made me a little nervous. Not just one or two owls, but about ten. They didn’t seem to like something about me because they swooped down so close to that I could feel their wing-wind.

I felt a bit creepy, but mostly exhilarated. After semi-blindly stumbling back to the car and driving home, I marveled at how well those owls can not only see and at night but also hunt with their sense of hearing. Their feathers help them do this. Each bowl-shaped face-feather grows on the satellite receiver-shaped face of a barn owl. Come to think of it, each feather is sort of shaped like a tiny cupped ear. These shapes funnel the tiniest of mouse noises into the owl’s brain. I assumed that these birds found me through their vision but I could be wrong. My assumption comes from my own reliance on sight. Perhaps the owls located me just by the noise of my breathing and walking. Like they find mice.

Another way to have fun...

violet-green-swallow-feather-falling

What springtime activity costs next to nothing, requires little or no travel and no electronics, brings both the joys of flight and interaction with wildlife, and does something good for creatures? Ingredients:

• A ten-foot, one-inch-wide plastic pipe.
• A bag of 2 to 6 inch-long curved body feathers from a goose or a swan or the larger feathers from a duck. Turkey or chicken feathers will do. One-inch to six inches long.

Part one…

Begin by scattering a handful of the smaller feathers on a cleared open space. A driveway or closely cropped grass is a good bet.

In my area, if barn, tree, or violet green swallows are building their nests nearby, they will find the feathers and swoop down to pick them up to line their nests. Nests with feathers, I read, have a higher success rate for hatching and rearing young than for those nests without feathers.  If this is the case, you are doing a good deed.

Once they have found your treasure trove of nesting materials and they know they can count on you for a continuing supply, they regularly come back for more. In return, you can count on them to be there for the next step.

Part two…

This is the time to bring out your ten-foot tube. Put a feather in the top end of the tube, raise it vertically, and blow the feather out. The birds will have their chance as the feather slowly floats on the air current.  Swallows greatly prefer grabbing their feathers in the air than to swooping headfirst toward a feather lying on the ground.

If you have them, start with two-inch feathers. Once the birds work up the courage and skill to grab these, you can work up to bigger and bigger curved feathers. These bird’s bodies, head to tail are only about 4 or 5 inches long, so a seven inch feather is a challenge to fly with, but they do. It is a bit clumsy at first and they will let go and re-grab the feather several times. That is unless another bird doesn’t get it first. If it does, a chase is on.

It’s a great photo opportunity if you have a fast lens, are quick and lucky, and take a lot of shots, most which will be misses—these birds fly and swoop fast! I would like to figure out how to capture the action on video but am nowhere near the cameraman I would need to be. Please tell me if you know a technique that can video-capture these swallows on the fly, or if  you have seen it done. Is it even possible?

Why I Find Feathers Alluring

Written for Center for Humans and Nature, May 4, 2015 Growing up, three bothersome younger sisters drove me to seek beauty, knowledge, solace, fun, and wonder in the big woods surrounding our home. This was in a rapidly suburbanizing area just east of Seattle. I remember, at 14, crouching by an overgrown ditch along a busy road, watching a foot-long trout, motionless in the clear water, occasionally flicking out to catch an insect. Even during those early explorations, I remember feeling the enormity of life and my small place in it.

Then came the bulldozers and construction. The ditch disappeared. I doubt if anyone else had a clue about the community of creatures that was destroyed. Most called it “development” but I saw it as a kind of un-development. I felt tremendously sad and have continued to feel this sadness the last 30 years as this sort of thing happens again and again. The feeling keeps following me as it follows many of us as we sift through the losses.

This feeling of awe and wonder as well as sadness has shaped my life’s work. I became a biologist and worked on various conservation advocacy projects, which exhausted me. I also worked for a long time as an environmental regulator, which, sometimes to my chagrin, was a profession geared toward asking, “How can we find a path through the regulations for this project go ahead?”

My heart remained absorbed with the beauty of the world. When I look at a bird, feel the wind, or even gaze at my own hand, I am enthralled. I wondered: how could I inspire this feeling in others?

Now, as a full time artist, I limit myself to a single medium. Any number of natural forms can foster appreciation for the natural world. I chose to use a rather unusual form: feathers. Ever since the head bird-keeper let me pick up pheasant and flamingo feathers at the zoo when I was twelve, I’ve seen feathers as reminders that I share the world with other creatures. Birds grow them, use them, and shed them. Yet when we find them, they have kept some of the essential qualities of the birds they came from like hints of flight, warmth, and beauty.

We have used feathers as symbols for millennia, everywhere on Earth. Feathers, to us, mean flight, transcendence, bridges between worlds, and escape. They are in our dreams. They are full of metaphor. As humans, we crave meaning. We find it through art and science, through religion, culture, myth, and our own experiences and imaginations.

I sometimes blink, finding that I have been holding a feather and staring at it for the last half hour. I’ve been marveling at its lightness, wondering where it has been, and thinking, “How did this feather serve to keep the bird warm and dry, or help it to fly?” I might drop the feather to see it swirl, spin, or flutter to the ground. I find myself in the middle of three spaces of perception: wonder and awe at the form; a small sense of connection to the feather’s original owner; and the desire for creative construction, with the accompanying thought, “How can I manipulate this into elegant, compelling, and meaningful art that will make people stop and wonder?” I view each individual feather as a small bit of perfection, a structure that art cannot enhance. Even so, I cut bird shapes out of feathers to augment the meanings.

It is feathers’ forms that draw me in. Certainly, feathers can have lovely colors and varied, interesting patterns. But the shapes and complex structures of the feathers are what makes them unique in the animal world. A museum curator recently told me that they were considering excluding my work from a museum tour around the United States. When I asked why, she said that the feathers were too delicate so she feared they would be damaged. This is a common misperception. We confuse lightness with delicacy. Feathers are made of protein, keratin. It is the same material our fingernails and a bird’s claws and beak are made of. They are made to be tough. At the same time, feathers don’t weigh much. They are light enough for a bird to fly at freeway speeds. They protect a bird for an entire year before they’re molted. They are a marvel of structural engineering.

The shapes of feathers drive my art. To honor feathers and the birds they came from, I don’t flatten them to a background but instead, keep their gentle curves by setting them apart from their background. Each flight feather curves a bit to form an airfoil. Each body feather, say of a duck, curves front to back and a bit from side to side to fit the bird’s body, like shingles covering a house’s roof. The body feathers’ curved shape also lets birds more fully expand or contract the feathers to provide less or more warmth. They fit together perfectly, overlapping to let both air and water slide smoothly along.

These are some of the reasons I find feathers alluring. It is a curious phenomenon: limiting oneself to a single focus can open up an enormous world of awe and exploration. So in my art, I find myself cutting and designing each piece, striving to capture an essence of a bird or what they do, like fly.

Life is harsh. We are born to die. To live, we kill things to eat. Creatures and habitats perish so we can have things, get where we are going, and pursue our many dreams. Part of me cries out for gentleness where beauty and wonder have the upper hand. Feathers do this for me. They serve their functions while gracing the bodies of the birds and are gently let go when a bird sheds. Yet they keep their form, complexity, and beauty. They are gifts from the birds.

Feathers Wasted

I made this video thinking about my January 11th blog entry. We eat about 50 billion chickens a year! But we do not eat their feathers. Historically, we have not known what to do with all the chicken feathers. A chicken is about six percent feathers by weight. That is 8-10 billion pounds of feathers a year! Most go to landfills but some are tilled into the soil as a low-grade fertilizer. A friend gave me several 50 pound feed bags full of large shed wing feathers from his crowned cranes. Some, the "B"-grades got "planted" in a garden.

How and why I make art with feathers