How to Photograph a Feather, the Basics

female red-tail black cockatoo feather, detail

This advice is about feather structure and applies to whatever equipment you are using, be it a cell phone or a high-end SLR camera.

Two major feather structures require you to adjust your shooting for better photos. The first is the downy part of the feather, usually at the base. The down is so fine that it disappears if the background color is anywhere close to the color of the down. Usually the down is a light color, so it won’t show up on a white background. The solution is not to take a picture on a darker background, then put it in an editing software program like Photoshop. These downy feather parts are so fine, they pick up the background color and it cannot be removed. Believe me, I have tried, used add on software, and consulted with all sorts of professional photographers—and failed. My solution has been to settle for a light neutral grey as the lightest background if I want to preserve the detail and create a lighter background

You can see a couple of examples in these photos of my work on Brenda Houston’s wallpaper. In one of the wallpaper examples, the downy part at the base of the feathers is washed out by the lighter background. Black or any darker color can make the feathers pop. But who wants black backgrounds for everything?

The second basic structure of feathers that influences how they photograph is in the fine detail of the barbs. The downy feathers are barbs but I am writing here about the barbs that make up the flat vane of the feather, above the place on the feather where the downy part is. These barbs are like branches all stuck together. They form tiny ridges running away from the shaft. Just like morning or evening sunlight creates shadows for more interesting photographs, side-lighting the feathers makes little shadows that highlight the little barb structures. Play with the angle, though I find that angling a light to shine across a feather just a little less than 90 degrees preferrable. For my photos, in addition to the side lighting, I often place another light to shine directly on the feather.

Oh, and if you want to improve your image, wash the feather first, unlike the dirty feather at the top of this blog. See my blog on cleaning feathers.

The Duck That Is Not a Duck

My friend John called to invite me to see the rare Eurasian whooper swan than was visiting some fields 75 miles north of me. I said, “Thanks for the invite but I am going down to the lake to watch some coots.”

Coots are duck-like but not ducks that I and many birders often think of as don’t-get-excited-about, no-account urban-ish shallow pond birds. Actually they are more closely related to the whooping crane than to any duck. They are playful, social, and entertaining.

A woman had asked me to make a piece about these playful coots. I pickup up my binoculars and headed down to our local Capitol Lake. This lake is actually a dammed up estuary at the southern end of Puget Sound. Sediment from the Deschutes (Washington) River that that ends there quickly filled the lake so the water body is shallow and usually scummy. Coots love it!

The commission gave me an excuse to sit for a few hours doing nothing but getting to know coots. Since it was a sunny day, the droplets of water sparkled remarkably when the birds frolicked, hence the inclusion of the feather-water-dots in the piece that I subsequently made.

How and When do Feathers Develop?

Embryo study #1: Flight Training

Songbirds, hawks, and many birds look naked on hatching. But look closely and they are covered by natal down all over their bodies that they grew when they were in the egg. In the nest about a week or so later, they sport newly grown thermal down. Then, in three or four weeks, juvenile feathers replace the thermal down. These three molts happen before the young birds even leave the nest.

Below is an easy to read article about feather formation from the Raptor Research Project: What are feathers? What is molt?https://www.raptorresource.org/2019/05/19/what-are-feathers-what-is-molt/

Much more detailed information about feather growth is in this article, Development, Regeneration, and Evolution of Feathers
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5662002/

Our Most Treasured Sense

Binocs, turkey feather,

Every time I use binoculars, microscopes, and eyeglasses, I appreciate the people and technologies that make them. All our senses give us important ways to know and interpret our surroundings and for most of us, sight seems the most important. It seems that birds are of the same opinion. Like my envy of birds’ abilities to fly, I am envious of their sight. This is because their vision is better than ours in several respects like color perception and movement, though mostly I am thinking of many birds’ visual acuity. For instance, the detail an eagle can see at eighty feet, we would have to be at twenty. As I was writing this, I found myself reading, going down a rabbit hole of studies and abstracts on bird vision. If you feel inclined, the references at the end of this Wikipedia page on bird vision is a good start. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_vision

Winter Hummingbird in the Snow

Emerald Cruiser

It is 15°F/-9°C and I am worried about the Anna’s hummingbirds. My friend said that a hummingbird was dead on his feeder but I suspect it may have only been in a slowed down torpor state which they do to conserve energy. When I taped a small light bulb to the bottom of my feeder to keep the sugar solution from freezing, it became the hummingbird-warm-yourself place to go.

I read general posts on the internet about hummingbird feeders being the reason that these little birds now live all year here but I question that. I see them sitting in the top of a bush, then quickly flying out to catch a small winter flying insect or something, land in the same branch, flick its beak and tongue, then do it all over again, much like a flycatcher captures flying insects. I suspect that this is their main sustenance and the sugar water supplements. I didn’t pursue due diligence to find all research on this but do have a this study to share with you. It was done out of Idaho where the Anna’s live in an even colder climate than me! https://www.boisestate.edu/ibo/science/winter-hummingbirds/. The published article is here: https://archive.westernfieldornithologists.org/archive/V52/52(1)-p058-p067.pdf

Guide to Legal and Illegal Feathers in the USA

I pay special attention to the legal requirements of possessing feathers since I sell feather art. Many people tell me about their small feather collections so I thought I’d share a rough guide to what feathers you can have in the USA.

I can have:

1. Feathers from most birds that are not native to North America. European Starlings, House Sparrows, Eurasian Collared Doves, and Ring-neck Pheasants are not native to North America. Also, think feathers of peacocks, many parrots, most of the 55 species of pheasants, and small songbirds like zebra finches that are kept in cages. The biggest exceptions to this are the restrictions on having feathers of most birds that live outside North America that are critically endangered.1,3

2. Feathers from most wild duck and geese you can’t sell, except for mallards. You can sell other kinds of duck feathers only if it is for fly tying for fishing.

3. Upland birds that people hunt—like turkey, grouse, and pheasant. Each state can have more restrictive laws, like in Washington State the Sharp-tailed Grouse is threatened so you can’t have those feathers unless you show it came from another state where hunting is permitted.

I can’t have:

1. Feathers from almost all other birds in my country—not eagles of course, but also not seagull feathers, songbird feathers, or even crow feathers (unless you have permission to kill crows, but you still can't sell them).2

2. Feathers from many birds from other countries that are critically endangered3.

Though all birds naturally shed their feathers about once a year, you’re not legally supposed to have most of them. A law called the (U.S.) North American Migratory Bird Act was made a long time ago when people were killing many birds to use for fashionable hats. It’s a broad-brush law intended to protect birds.  It doesn’t recognize the difference between plucked feathers, naturally shed feathers, or bird skins; you can’t have any of it. If a feather was pulled from a dead bird that you found at the side of the road or the beach, how does someone know that the bird wasn’t killed on purpose just for the feathers? It can sometimes seem silly but it is a matter of reasonable enforcement, like speeding law enforcement on the highway.

I try to be familiar with the laws but the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service is the place to go to for the final word in the USA. Here are some links to their sites plus another helpful link:

1 The American Federation of Aviculture's website had a discussion of when you can have feathers from parrots from other countries that are critically endangered in those countries but because they are commonly kept in aviaries in the USA, it may be ok to have their feathers in the USA. I am working on reconnecting to this link.

2 The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is the place to go for the final word on the Migratory Bird Act. The law is explained and they have an alphabetically arranged list of protected birds.

3 Here is a link to lists of earth's endangered species; click Cites Appendices. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service  oversees the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) within the USA.

Flight Training

Embryo #3 Flight Training

An embryo can represent many ideas like safety, growth, vulnerability, and beginnings. It is after all, where feathers begin. So isn’t this where flight begins? At the beginning stages, a human and a bird embryo look very similar. We are both floating weightless in a sea of liquid. Maybe this is as close to flying with our bodies as we get.

Pterosphere (ecosystem of feathers)

A large number of creatures live within each bird’s feathers including lice and mites, bacteria, and fungi. These are whole worlds of eating, feeding, and reproducing. Mites for instance feed on bacteria and fungi that feed on keratin, the protein substance feathers are made out of. They also feed on accrued debris. It is an entire community of creatures (some unique to each species of bird) and usually ends up balancing the system, the pterosphere which makes for a healthy bird at least in terms of fully functioning feathers.

If you want to dive a little deeper into a pterosphere study, here is an interesting recent investigation into mite behavior on feathers at night: https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.3550

A Failed Attempt

Andrea’s Bird and my Feather Copy

Artists who use Sumi-e style, try to capture the essence of nature in a the simplest brushstrokes. To do that well, the artists has to feel the core spirit as well as see it. My mother, who painted the songbird was a master at this. I inherited some of her sketchbooks in which this bird was painted as a quick study. She hand ground charcoal to make ink in a traditional japanese-developed way, looked carefully at the bird with her whole being, and put her brush to paper in a few quick deft strokes.

I cannot capture that simplicity in my cutting but i tried in homage to my mother and a bow to the sumi-e tradition that acknowledges close intertwinings with what we observe.

We are just a small part of life here on Earth.

Most of the world is nonhuman with just as much reason to be here as us and with just as much awareness in many different and wondrous forms.

A poem by Chris Bursk that Martha sent...

The Thing With Feathers

It’s the first thing you hear in the morning,
the last you hear at night.
In the woods, in the swamps,
in the old steeple, in the ruined eaves,
over the wreckage of a car
your mother drove straight into a wall.
The bird won’t stop singing.
It is perched in the ashes of a house that burned to the ground.
Wherever you move, it’s one hop
ahead of you. Tireless
as a creek, it’s a tune that will not allow itself
to be forgotten. It keeps building
and leaving its nest, all chatter, all expectation,
water singing to itself
in the shadows as well as in the sunlight.
That insufferable optimist.

No matter how many doors you slam,
curses you shout, rocks you throw,
it pipes up louder than ever
on this very branch of this very tree outside your house
— as if stones must be your way of applauding.
It was singing the morning you got fired,
the day you brought grief to the person
you most wanted to protect,
the evening when the great cause you’d pledged yourself to
failed. It sang
while your father was writing his suicide note,
the night your dear friend told you he was HIV-positive,
the night you could find nothing remaining
to believe in, when all you wanted
was to be left alone. It sings in places so dark
you can’t see into them.
It’s out there singing now.

— November 2005

Finding Deep Creative Inspiration

Books, words, and art are real and so are our phones and computers and everything that is online. But they are also all made up by us and mostly about us. They can describe the world but they are not the wider world in which we are intertwined and depend on.

While we are quite aware that we relate to and learn from other people, we can also relate to and learn from other animate beings. If you think about it, in order to survive, most of our time on earth we have paid closer attention to other creatures and our environment than we do now. We still have that ability hard-wired into us, it is just dampened when we live in cities and in our books and phones and computers.

Creatures still have to pay close attention to us. For example, a bird you are watching is certainly aware of and relating to you in some way. I think that we are still on some deep level, more aware of the creatures and objects around us than we know.

I often sit still with a feather in my hand, letting the busyness drain away. The feather speaks, not in words, but in a different kind of perception . Often for me, it is akin to a kinesthetic feeling. Or it may be a knowing that doesn’t seem to just be a product of my thoughts or imagination but somehow also involves the feather.

Hummingbird Flower?

A friend flew in for a visit from the city wearing bright red lipstick. While she was standing near the hummingbird feeder she became excited and a little flustered when a hummingbird faced her lips, hovering there for ten full seconds.

Of course, that put my visual art-mind to working which resulted in several small studies.

I began by searching through feathers that had splotched of red to represent the lips. The perfect feathers were from the wing of an amazon parrot feather and the tail of a male red-black cockatoo. They have a splotch of bright red and the rest of the feathers are jet black. I made two pieces. When I finished and looked at them I realized that they reminded me of white people making fun of black people by painting their faces black and making big white (and sometimes red) lips. So instead, I made this one out of an amazon parrot tail feather.

Human Figures in Wildlife art?

Birds are the focus of my work. Since they fly and we cannot, they and their feathers are symbols of our aspirations. They have  meaning for us. Plus, since birds can fly and escape, they aren't afraid to show themselves, unlike, for instance, mice. So they are eminently observable.  

I haven't usually carved people into my creations. This is because we tend to focus only on ourselves when thinking about this world, to the exclusion of other creatures. So I like to give birds a voice.

However birds represent some of our actual, mythical, environmental, and personal connections to the world. So I have begun to explore this relationship using human-ish silhouettes. When drawing people figures, it struck me how much we consist of long arms and legs plus big hands and a round head--like stick figures. I wonder if that is how other creatures may initially see us. 

Necessity

Peacock and Quills #3

A woman whose big male peacock had died asked me to make a piece out of his display feathers. The problem was, she had only a few of his feathers and only one of them was big enough and in good enough shape to carve. Necessity is the mother of invention, right? I liked what I came up with here.

Tiny Feather Details

My work is precise and detailed, right? Well … only sort of. This enlarged cutout is 1/3 of an inch high. At this detail, you can see all sorts of cutting errors that you don’t see when the image is not blown up. But now look at the detail of the feather itself. It is perfect. Notice how the red, green and black colors blend seamlessly into one another. See how the barbs of the feather arise from the shaft and perfectly align with each other. You cannot improve a feather.

How to Find Deep Creative Inspiration

mallard duck feather

Put away your books and electronics to be with what is real. Let me explain: books and words are real and so are our phones and computers and everything that is online. But they are all made up by us and all about us, not the wider world that we live in. They can describe the wider world but they are not the wider world in which we are intertwined and depend on.

Plants and animals and even the rocks, clouds, rivers, and mountains all move in time as do we. While we are quite aware that we relate to and learn from other people, we can also relate to and learn from other animate beings. If you think about it, most of our time on earth we had to pay closer attention to other creatures and our environment just as they continue to pay attention to us. We still have that ability hard-wired into us, it is just dampened for most of us as we live in cities and in our books and phones and computers.

For instance, a bird you are watching is certainly aware of and relating to you in some way. There is a back and forth. It isn’t merely a product of your imagination as popular culture often pooh poohs. It is a real thing.

I often sit still with a feather in my hand, letting the busyness drain away. The feather speaks, not in words, but in a different kind of perception often akin to a kinesthetic feeling. Or it may be a knowing that doesn’t seem to just be a product of my thoughts or imagination but somehow also involves the feather.

Feather art highlights article about bird loss in North America

Firmament

https://www.audubon.org/news/north-america-has-lost-more-1-4-birds-last-50-years-new-study-says

Fantastic Bird Names that Make You Smile

Firecrown . ocellated turkey feathers . 12 x 12 inches

Hummingbird names dazzle the imagination. Here is a list of words used to name them:

Rainbow . Gorget . Coquette . Golden . Comet . Hillstar . Metaltail . Colorful . Fiery . Helmetcrest . Sungem . Violet . Crowned . Blossom . Sparkling . Mountaingem . Topaz . Coppery . Iridescent . Prizmal . Sunangel . Emerald . Crimson . Blossom . Beryline . Sylph . Brilliant . Woodnymph . Gilded . Glowing . Streamertail . Azure . Magenta . Star . Rainbow . Sunbeam . Festive . Shining . Glittering . Spangled . Firecrown . Royal . Oasis . Woodstar . Calliope . Volcano . Scintiliant . Glow .Garnet

Guide for When to Capitalize Bird Names

Swan Reflection, Mute Swan feathers

The English language has protocols and rules for when to capitalize and when not to. City names and our own names for instance are always supposed to be capitalized. Often scientific creature names have capitals and common names do not.

A capital letter is an honor bestowed. Where we decide on the proper placement of capital letters tends to leave out and thereby diminish creatures like birds by grouping them without capitals. Our capital letter protocols trend toward elevating ourselves (our proper names and also like, “the English, the French, etc.), what we have made (like names of cars: Ford Taurus), and scientific endeavors (like genus names). This is another way that we set ourselves apart from the natural world. To remedy this in a small way, I am changing my writing to capitalize the common names of birds, like Mute Swan instead of mute swan. It is going to take some effort to break the habit. Perhaps I will appreciate and honor these creatures a bit more.