How to Store and Keep Feathers

From my previous post on Care of Feathers, I received an informative comment from Amy Reineri: Be careful of storing feathers or other natural materials in sealed containers if you live in a more humid environment. Trapped air that has any moisture, if subjected to temperature changes that take it through it's dew point, will deposit and withdraw moisture from the contents of the bag and this can fatigue the materials to the point they decompose. Feathers, leather, dried insects - all of these will decompose due to the humidity cycle if kept in a sealed container with variable temperatures. If you choose to store something in a sealed bag, you can put hygroscopic crystals in with them or you should keep them in the same temperature environment you bagged them in.

That said, if you vacuum-seal your bagged feathers thereby taking the air out, water absorption would not be a problem. I usually just squeeze the air out by hand and call it good. Feathers under 35% moisture can get so dry that they become brittle. A sealed shadowbox using acid-neutral components with UV protected acrylic kept in a stable environment is a better long-term storage container than plastic bags.

Here is a link to a museum’s more thorough explanation of how to keep feathers.

How to Become Beautiful

EnTrance, peacock feathers, 22 x 18 inches

Beauty is everywhere. Finding it is just a matter of noticing, slowing down, moving toward it, and being surrounded.

Look What the Stork Brought

This stork on an egg was the first toy that I was given when I was born. Some said the stork brought me but then why would other people say that my mother did a good job? Notice that it's a bird? Perhaps this was a beginning of my fascination with birds and feathers.

While walking the beach recently, I witnessed rows and rows of tiny broken down plastic pieces in the rocks and sand at the high tide line. Perhaps they wouldn’t be there if every piece of plastic manufactured was as sacred to its user as this plastic toy is to me.

Why Birds Are Protected: A History of Fashion 100 Years Ago

This history of the bird feather fashion trade just over 100 years ago is jaw-dropping for the amounts of birds that were killed. This website link lists kinds of species killed, number killed and prices for each. For instance, to quote an entry , “six egrets to yield one “ounce” of aigrette plumes. This being the case, the 21,528 ounces sold over a nine moth period, as above table states, translates as 129,168 egrets killed for the London plume markets alone.”

Fashioning Feathers: Dead Birds, Millinery Crafts and the Plumage Trade is an exhibition conceived and created by Dr Merle Patchett © 2011.

In the early part of the 20th century the business of killing birds for the millinery trade was practiced on a large scale, involving the deaths of hundreds of millions of birds in many parts of the world.

In North America, the Heron family was favoured due to its abundance and beautiful wispy feathers. By the turn of the 20th century, this trade had nearly eliminated egrets in the US, and populations of numerous other bird species around the globe were also approaching extinction.

Reports of these atrocities led to the formation of the first Audubon and conservation societies, who sought to ban the trade and persuade ladies not to use plumage for their own adornment. Campaigns against ‘murderous millinery’ by the Audubon Society in the US and the RSPB in the UK initiated wildlife protection acts which eventually prohibited both national and international commerce in protected bird species.

This section of the Dr. Patchett’s exhibition seeks to outline the extent of the business of killing birds for the millinery trade and to evidence the efforts of various individuals and groups to bring an end to the international plumage trade.

How to Identify Feathers

The website Featherbase is a great place to see a lot of different kinds of feathers and maybe even to identify a feather for yourself. I enjoyed roaming around on their site; it is well put together. The rest is quoted from their website introduction.

"Since the 20th century, scientific ornithology has been closely linked to the conservation of birds. The study of feathers is one such factor that is often overlooked. In museums, the majority of their bird skin collections are archived, stored away in drawers under lock and key and only ever seen by a very selective audience and not the general public.

The Austrian behavioural scientist Konrad Lorenz once said: "You only love what you know, and you only protect what you love." Being able to touch, feel and study a feather in the hand engages people, especially children, with nature; what child hasn’t stopped to pick up a feather in a park or their backyard and marvel at it, and wonder what bird it came from. From a long, slender Arctic Tern primary, which has undertaken an incredible migratory journey of around 44,000 miles from pole to pole, to the soft, downy feather of a Barn Owl, helping the bird to fly on silent wings as it hunts at night; every feather has a fascinating story to tell, each so unique in its makeup, shape, form, texture, colour and function they serve to the bird. Feathers can teach us so much about birds and how they live. They bring people closer to the natural world – and therefore play an important role in its preservation.

Featherbase is a working group of German feather scientists who came together with their personal collections and created the biggest and most comprehensive online feather library in the world. Using our website, it is possible to identify feathers from hundreds of different species, compare similarities between species, work out gender or age-specific characteristics and look at the statistics of countless feather measurements.

In contrast to the conventional work of museums, Featherbase is much more oriented towards the general public, allowing not just enrolled scientists the opportunity to gain access to the collection, but anyone with an interest in studying birds and their feathers. Featherbase also frequently collaborates with scientific or educational organizations by offering images, data or teamwork in general. Featherbase works completely independently, without administrative affiliation, and first and foremost without commercial interests. We are a non-profit making entity and funded entirely by our own contributors. The collecting of feathers and skins for our database is approved by the relevant authorities, and for any protected/CITES listed species held, we are fastidious about maintaining records of their origin."

Feather Star

These creatures use their “feathers” to fly. It is a lot easier to do in dense water than flying in the air as anyone knows who has flapped their arms in both elements

Choices

An Unusual Event . turkey feathers

Do you ever go to the grocery store and feel that the many decisions choices of say, all the different shampoos, drives you crazy? I do. The other day I tried to decide between 9 different varieties of apples. That’s a lot of information to process but mostly I didn’t have enough information to make an informed decision so I just guessed. I would have been more certain, calmer, and happier with less choices or none.

This is titled, "An Unusual Event". It may feel usual for some of us to be able to go to the store and be offered such abundance but historically and considering all the shaky chains of supply that we have recently developed, it really is unusual.

Change

Light Crane Shower . argus pheasant feathers . 55 x 30 inches

Things do not stay the same no matter how much I would like them to. Movement is the only constant in my life. I try holding on but all it ever gets me is feeling dissatisfied, stuck, and worried.

This is why I try to impart feelings of movement, of flow in my artistic creations.

The Latest in a Series

Marsh Cattail Wren Duck Feather study #2, mallard speculum wing feather

I expect that many creative people ask themselves this question, “Shall I pursue new ideas or refine old ones?” I have sketched several hundred ideas for carved feathers in a my journals. Only a fifth of them have been used to create my art. The rest of the sketches sit in my journal. I rarely refer to the older drawings. In December, I told myself that I would, so I marked a few promising looking older sketches and picked one to pursue. After I created one, it fostered other ideas that used that same concept. Today I made the 12th piece, three larger pieces and nine small studies, the latest is pictured here. I have not had time to even look at the other drawings in my journal.

Many of the pieces in a series like this are creative refinements of the original which I find quite worthwhile to make. However, this is one reason why it is hard to create something from every sketch if the act of following one idea leads to another which leads to another and so on.

Male mallard secondary wing feathers are called speculum feathers. I don't know why for certain but it is likely because the blue portions are reflective, the structurally formed blues reflect the light sort of like a mirror. Besides the lovely shine, I thought they had a vague cattail shape to them. Plus, ducks like wet places next to cattails.

Disappearing Birds

When birds disappear from my neighborhood in part because of all the new housing developments, life loses some of its color.

This piece has been long in the imagining as well as the engineering. I still have a ways to go. The grey carved feather is from a true tail feather of a peacock. These tail feathers are meant to support all the colorful display feathers that grow on the back of the male peacock which we often mistakenly call “the tail”.

The boxes will have bottles with colorful feathers inside, perhaps as memories of what once was.

Where Are the Big Colorful Feathers?

Marsh Cattail Wren . 7 x 5 inches . amazon parrot secondary wing feathers

Except for feathers from a couple of parrots like macaws tails, birds do not have large colorful feathers. Most colorful feathers are small. When color is on wing feathers, I have noticed that the bright colors are placed where they can be hidden, like on the secondary wing feathers.

The three to five-inch small feathers with a bit of color require compositions of many feathers for my commonly sized pieces of 12 inches or bigger. However, when I have a design idea that use just one or two of these small feathers, the finished piece will have to be smaller.

These amazon parrot secondary flight feathers sport the bright red in this picture that reminded me of the shape of cattails. Cattails are not red of course but if they were, they would pose a fine juxtaposition to the marsh wrens whose colors are so brownly-muted cattail-colored that they are quite difficult to spot. Usually, all I see is a hint of movement, maybe the rustle of a cattail stalk.

Feather the Nest

If birds survived when the rest of the dinosaurs did not, it may be partially because birds kept warm with feathers and when they lined the nest with feathers, the feathers would keep the eggs warmer. In addition, feathered nests protect baby birds from microbial infections and parasites.

One research write-up is here: https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.6931. The study also tells a story of blue tit males placing colored feathers on the outside rim of their nests. Who knows why!

Get That Bug!

Get That Bug! turkey feathers, 16 x 16 inches

I made and named this carving, Get That Bug, not consciously thinking at the time that this is one way we are trying to cope with the coronavirus.

The thing is, flycatchers are really good at catching bugs. Are we?

Getting Peculiar

I love making my art and am used to alone time in the studio. But during the pandemic isolation, I miss socializing. It is starting to make me a little peculiar (more than I already was). When I went to the market, I found myself just standing still staring at each person. Also, I notice I am getting a little rusty in the communication when on Zoom calls with a lot of people.

Unusual Feather Coloring Here

Gull Flight detail

These gull silhouettes are carved from the shed tail feathers of a great blue turaco. These birds live in sub-Saharan Africa where their bodies have learned to use copper in the food they eat to make green, red, and blue-colored feathers. Other birds also grow green, red, and blue feathers but not by using copper. For their red feathers, they metabolize a class of chemicals called carotenoids in the food they eat. The blues in all birds’ feathers except the turaco comes from the light absorbing and reflective microscopic form of the structure of their feathers.

What Bird Is This Lovely Feather From?

This is from a northern flicker. Notice the orange-red shaft. Red-shafted northern flickers live in the western part of North America and yellow-shafted ones live in the eastern part. No other bird I know of displays yellow or orange color in its feathers’ shafts. Most bird’s feather shafts are whitish, some are black.

Taking a quick look at the research*, I learned that the color in these shafts (and other parts of the feathers) is made through metabolizing what the birds eat: food with carotenoids. This is the same food ingredient that many kinds of birds use to make colored feathers, reds, oranges, and yellows. The yellow shafted northern flickers metabolize their food in a slightly different way to make the yellow color than the red shafted flickers metabolize for the orange color.

I found speculation but little solid information that explains how birds use the yellow and orange-shafts; how it helps them live their lives.

People sometimes send me images of feathers they have found and want to know what bird it is from. This one was easy.

*Karen L. Wiebe and Gary R Bortolotti, Variation in Carotin-based color in Northern Flickers in a Hybrid Zone. Wilson Bull., 114(3), 2002, pp. 393–400

Kingfisher and the Mussel

This article was taken from the Northern Woodlands magazine. Researching kingfisher behavior as I was working on a piece about kingfishers and fish, I came across some fascinating writing in the Northern Woodlands Magazine (I visited and presented at their annual conference a year ago). The topic is a kingfisher and a mussel. The Kingfisher got its beak stuck in a freshwater mussel, possibly thinking it was a fish. The author, Declan McCabe explains in his article included below in this posting.

My inspiration was what sometimes happens when people create ponds to keep koi and goldfish. They witness occasional predation by herons and kingfishers.

Goldfisher, using a naturally shed argus pheasant primary wing feather

Adelaide Tyrol drawn from a photograph by Rich Kelly

Declan McCabe, who teaches biology at Saint Michael’s College wrote the following:

Last July, Rich Kelley posted a most unusual photograph to the Vermont Birding Facebook group with the caption, “Someone bit off more than he could chew.” The photo, taken in the Missisquoi National Wildlife Refuge, showed a belted kingfisher weighted down by a mussel clamped firmly onto its beak. They were locked in an embrace that, absent intervention, would have been fatal for both; thankfully, Rich effected a rescue.

The photo inspired a rare eureka moment. I strung a few scientific facts together and jumped to a possibly outlandish conclusion: this had been deliberate action by the mussel, doing what mussels do, misinterpreted by a kingfisher, doing exactly what kingfishers do.

Before you write me off as a biologist out in the sun too long, bear with me while I present the facts. First, consider the kingfisher. The name says it all: they fish and fish well. Kingfishers are visual predators that drop from high perches to execute full body dives so their spear-shaped beaks cut through the water – but not through the fish! That’s right, contrary to popular belief, kingfishers don’t spear fish. Instead, they open wide and close their bills to firmly grip their slimy prey.

To really evaluate my speculation, I needed to find out if the belted kingfisher menu extends beyond fish to include, perhaps, eastern lamp mussels. I learned that the kingfisher’s diet may comprise insects, crayfish, and occasionally small mammals, amphibians, and reptiles. But the king’s share of their diet consists of fish. Nowhere in the papers I consulted were mussels of any type part of the kingfisher’s meal plan.

The first part of my quest was complete: it seemed unlikely that the kingfisher in question was out hunting mussels. My next step was to explore mussel biology to see if the timing of Kelley’s photo was right for my hypothesis.

Eastern lamp mussels don’t generally travel far. To disperse, they act like submerged hitchhikers. Larval lamp mussels, called “glochidia,” attach to fish gills for about a month and travel as far as the fish swims before dropping off in their long term home. How they attach to the fish is the link in the chain that may just have accidentally ensnared a Vermont kingfisher.

Lamp mussel glochidia don’t swim, and they remain in their mother’s pouch until a fish makes direct contact with mother mussel. Direct fish-mussel contact has not been left to chance. When the season is right, the mother lamp mussel grows an extraordinary structure that hungry fish just can’t resist.

Sprouting from its soft tissue, and protruding between the half shells, the mussel grows a near perfect “fish.” At the “head” end is often an eye spot, and at the opposite end, a tail complete with fish-like patterns and even a delicate set of fins. To complete the ruse, the mussel twitches its little lure, like any good angler, to catch the eye of a passing fish. Ideally, the lure attracts a yellow perch, which is the only known host for eastern lamp mussels. Real fish strike at the little fake “fish,” and the mother mussel ejects her glochidia, which promptly clamp onto the fish’s gills.

Another question essential to my theorized plot is when does all of this happen? Scientists on Lake Ontario found glochidia on yellow perch gills in both May and August. So it’s reasonable to expect appetizing mussel-fish lures in July in Lake Champlain.

If the mussel lures are convincing enough to entice fish to strike, it’s a small leap to imagine that they may fool a different visual fish predator: the kingfisher. A leap of faith and imaginative conjecture however, is not enough to provide scientific certainty. To truly support my hypothesis, I’ll need to schedule an interview with a certain kingfisher. And I’ll ask the question every teenager dreads: “What WERE you thinking?”

Declan McCabe new book, Turning Stones: Life in Freshwater (McDonald & Woodward Publishing) includes this and many other essays.

Prints

Peacock feather wallpaper design

I sometimes work with designers to make large prints of my original art and of photographs of feathers. This one is in a line of wallpaper through a contract with Brenda Houston who creates and sells beautiful wallpapers. Also, my photos of feathers have found their way through designers into hospitals and hotels. Mostly though, I create original art and don’t have a business of selling smaller prints of feathers nor prints of my original art. One exception is that I make some prints of my original work to gift to nonprofit organizations with a natural history conservation bent for fundraising activities.

Birds Paint Their Feathers

Chilean flamingo feather

Subconsciously, I imagine that humans are better than other creatures. For instance, I usually think that we are the only creatures who are creative. Here is a little tidbit that helps shake that up that assumption:

Some birds use secretions from their oil gland to paint enhancements onto their feather colors. For instance, I thought that the flamingos’ orange color came from their bodies processing the carotenoid-rich shrimp that they eat into growing feathers as pink and orange. It does, but in addition, an even brighter orange color oozes out of the bird’s oil gland on its back. The bird carefully and selectively spreads this on their feathers to further color itself.

Other birds find ways in their environment to brighten their feathers. In zoos, the bearded vulture’s feathers are white. In the wild, they rub their bellies into red soil, then choose where to further spread the red color on their other feathers.

Over a dozen bird families color own feathers in some way. In addition, bright pigmented reds, oranges and yellows in birds are derived from the food that they eat. We might assume that creatures are dumb and do everything by instinct. However, birds consciously choose the best foods for themselves consciously evaluating a number of factors, one of which might be, “How is this going to color my feathers?”

The more I learn about birds and other living beings, the less I imagine my human abilities as setting me apart and above birds and the rest of life.

1. Amat, Juan A, & Rendon, M.A. 2017. Flamingos. Behavior, Biology, and Relationship with Humans

2. Negro J.J., Margalida A., Hiraldo F., & Herdia R. 1999. The Function of the Cosmetic Coloration of Bearded Vultures: When Art Imitates Life.

3. Delhey K, 2007. Cosmetic Coloration in Birds: Occurrence, Function, and Evolution. American Naturalist

Getting Outside a Box

Andrea’s Bird, adapted from a sumi-e sketch of my mother’s (she was an artist)

“It’s tempting to hide in small rooms built from quick answers”. Merlin Sheldrake, in his book, Entangled Life. His research into fungus points toward life as much more complicated than we think; like our bodies being composed of more fungus and microorganism cells than animal cells. So, he asks, “who are we?” Are we really the individuals we think we are? Or are we less well defined, whole environments working together to make what we imagine to be our our free will?

When I consider this, I let go of my quick answers and habits of viewing the world. Then sounds become sharper and the grass appears greener.

This kind of thinking attracts me because I want my art to pleasantly surprise people after they view it, to see the world a little differently, with more sparkle.