Nuthatches

Mixed Flock.

On the side of a mountain under a ponderosa pine, a warm October sun lulled me into a sleepy happy place. Plop! Something small and hard fell on my face interrupting my dreams. Opening one eye, I spied a white breasted nuthatch working the tree over, looking for bugs by prying up loose bark, which rained down around me.

Lying there, occasionally dodging falling bark, I watched a flock of them for an hour. What struck me (besides the bark) was the agility and intensity of these little birds. They looked in every nook and crevice, upside down under branches, sideways, and on the trunk.

At 17 by 14 inches, this piece is made from two turkey feathers.

To Live

Skipping Dinner.

I dream of taking a trip back through the eons that birds have been on the earth to see all the different shapes and forms and colors of the feathers that have come and gone. Some birds probably just slowly changed over generations to something better adapted to their surroundings while other species just perished. It would be a journey to see the continuation of the dance of life on earth. How do humans fit into the world today—from the perspective of feathers? The male peacock’s display feathers evolved to be so long and ornate that they place the bird at the edge of the ability to survive. The peacock’s tail limits its movements so much that a little more tail would keep it from escaping predators. We are impressively clever, active, and striving creatures. It seems like we keep getting more so. Our inherent ability to invent and build appears to place us at the edge of our ability to continue to thrive and maybe survive. What if through our inventiveness, as we grow in numbers, change our surroundings to suit our immediate needs, and reduce the ability of the earth to support us, we are evolving beyond our capacity to inhabit the earth?

Stickiness

Try taking two flight feathers from the same side of a bird’s wing and put the front, leading edge parallel and over the trailing next feather, like it was on a bird. The pull them gently and you can feel the feathers grab. If you put the leading edge of a feather underneath trailing edge of its neighboring feather instead of on top, there will be no grabbing; they will just glide smoothly over each other.

These feathers stick together in at least three ways to help make the wing smooth and aerodynamic:

1. The leading edges of the feathers let a small amount of air through as the bird flies, a little more air than comes through the trailing edges. This evens the pressures caused by moving air which would otherwise tend to pull feathers away from the smooth airfoil a wing is supposed to make for a bird to fly.
2. The leading edge of each feather curves slightly down and the trailing edge faces slightly up. So when two flight feathers on a wing overlap, the leading edge grabs trailing edge of the next flight feather.
3. The almost microscopic barbules on the leading and trailing edges of each flight feather sort of splay out which help to grab onto the next feather, further creating more of  a seal so the feathers stick together firmly in the wind.

Reference: Muller, V. and Patone (1998) Air Transmissivity of Feathers. Journal of Experimental Biology 201, 2591-2599

Killing Birds for Ebay

Argus Pheasant wing feathers

Someone is killing wild Great Argus Pheasants in SE Asia and selling their feathers on Ebay. It is making me sad as these pheasants are one of my favorite birds. Partly why I use feathers in my art is because they are freely given by birds. These pheasants shed their feathers every year where they are kept in zoos and private aviaries. I want people to appreciating life through my photography and art, not kill it; and especially not buy feathers from birds that were killed for their feathers.

Can taking pictures of beautiful birds and feathers or making art from them urge someone to buy feathers from birds that were killed for their feathers? I hope not. But it is a thought that bothers me and several wildlife photographers I have spoken to. I did report this auction to Ebay and federal authorities.

Designing with Feathers Presents a Problem

Swallow Perch.

Feather shapes and sizes are quite limited. How does one arrange a typically large, long and skinny feather into a wider picture? Many of my pieces center on a single cut feather. In order to create a pleasing, unified, creative design that tells a story or conveys a feeling, there has to be more to the design than just the single feather. That is, unless the final picture is long and skinny. I prefer not to do that. I have placed feathers drifting off a preening bird image to fill the space. Sometimes I add small feathers to balance a picture as with a cut-feather silhouette of a bird singing with feathers coming out of its mouth. Using two or more large cut feathers has sometimes solved the dilemma.

Working feathers into unified designs is all part of a vexing but rewarding process of creation. Sometimes I wish wild birds would grow big wide, wide feathers to make this process easier. But that wouldn't help the birds very much would it?

The Feather and the Ant

I am not the only one who appreciates a fallen, shed feather that I find on the ground. I came across this ant who came across this feather on a windy day. I am not sure why the ant appreciates the feather, but it does and is able to something about it, a testament to its strength and the feather’s lightness. Good luck, Ms Ant.

A Perfect Passion

I made a humbling discovery that I am not the only one who has a passion for showing off feathers in unsuccessful attempts to enhance already perfect natural beauty.

Hummersucker

Hummingsucker.

The red-breasted sapsucker drills neat rows of holes in various trees and feeds on the sap. It maintains the holes so the sap keeps flowing. Luckily for the Anna’s hummingbird, this sap (which is a tree nectar) is available to slurp when flowers are out of season in the Northwestern USA winter. Both of these sap-loving birds show striking splashes of red feathers. The hummingbird displays metallic red on its throat, and the sapsucker presents a bright red head and breast.

Jay Sunbather

Shaking sparkling drops shimmer in the sun. A jay needs its bath just like you and me. A good bath and shaking will loosen dust, dislodge mites, shake off dander, remove loose feathers, de-oil, and clean messes. In a pinch, a dust bath will do. But bathing is just a start. When done with the bath, the jay flies to a safe perch and preens for an hour, finishing for the moment, the never-ending task of keeping its feathers in impeccable shape.

Owl for One and One for Owl

Charlie Harper, Owltercation

Owl for One and One for Owl

I have rediscovered the artist, Charlie Harper. In his art, he reduced the complexity of animal shapes into their essences in geometrical forms.  He also had a fondness for and understanding of the natural world which he captured, often with a sense of humor. Charlie Harper’s piece,Owltercation (in addition to watching three crows chase an owl out of the tall fir tree near where I live) inspired me to design this feather shadowbox I call, Owl for One and One for Owl.   

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.