Without Feathers, We Are Naked /  by Chris Maynard

reposted from 2019

I learned a new word: “Metalute”. It comes from the Mehinaku language, a tribe that still lives in forests of Brazil and means that one is naked unless wearing feathers. I first read about this in a New York Times article (great article on the transformative, talismanic power of feathers, August, 2019) that referenced the anthropologist Thomas Gregor. I found his Mehinaku paper (in Portuguese) entitled The Drama of Daily Life in a Brazilian Indian Village that was published in 1977 and was able to sort of muddle my way through it with my Spanish.

What About Feather Colors? /  by Chris Maynard

Bright reds in feathers come from what’s in the bird’s food. Carotenoid compounds give this feather its red and orange colors. Carrots have this, think carotene. though eating carrots doesn’t make your skin orange. Over eons, birds have learned to metabolize these compounds into their feathers to create orange, red, and yellow feathers. If we could make our skin different bright colors by eating things like carrots, our species would have a lot more skin variety that the browns, russet reds, and blacks. Instead, our duller skin pigments come from melanin which happens to be the same compound that most bird feathers are colored with. Interestingly, the earlier bird species like ducks and pheasants never incorporated carotenoids into their metabolism to make brightly colored red, yellow, and orange feathers; but later in evolution, songbirds, parrots, and other birds did.

How these mushrooms get their red color, I don’t know.

Amanita Muscaria mushroom and Red-tailed Black Cockatoo feather

Dinosaur Feathers /  by Chris Maynard

Louse on a dinosaur feather preserved in amber

That dinosaurs had feathers was an abstract idea to me until I began looking at images of these feathers preserved in fossilized tree sap—amber. I wrote earlier about the term, pterosphere. It means the ecology of the habitat on a bird within the feathers, like beetles and mites that eat and decompose skin and feathers—on the bird. Well, dinosaurs had them too! Amber specimens show encased feathers complete with associated mites and beetles.

Witnesses to Life and Death /  by Chris Maynard

Witnesses, 12 x 15 inches, Hornbill tail feathers

Trillions of cells are forming in the plants in my garden this Spring. It couldn’t happen without the many deaths of myriad plants and the tiny microscopic creatures that break down plant bodies into small stuff that the new growth can use.

I like to challenge my cultures tendency to avoid death, divorcing it from life by accentuating the break-down side of life in different ways in my art.

Feathers are lovely symbols of our aspirations like flight, hope, and achievement. They are also created because the birds that grow them killed plants and animals to eat to provide nutrients to the growing feathers. Personally, I find it wholesome and sacred to acknowledge this inherent folding of constant little deaths into our living. Like saying a blessing before a meal.

Recycling Feathers /  by Chris Maynard

Each bird sheds hundreds of feathers each year. What happens to them? This small ant is repurposing this huge feather for something, I don’t know what. I stall the breakdown of a few shed feathers by recycling them in my art. But for most feathers, mites, fungus, and many other small creatures eat them, turning them into food that plants use. Birds eat the plants and fruits and bugs that eat the plants, growing more feathers!

Like Water Off A Duck's Back. /  by Chris Maynard

Left side, water, right ride is oil

A thin layer of air is trapped by the microsculptural bumps on ducks’ feathers making for a silvery sheen (called a plasteron) when feathers are dipped into water. It’s about surface tension. But if a bird dives deeper than several meters, the pressure of the water overcomes the surface tension, potentially soaking the feathers. But the feathers still remain dry! How? The ability to stay dry under the pressures of deeper water has to do how the birds’ preen oil changes the pressure needed to fully soak the feather. This allows deep divers’ feathers to just shed the water when the bird surfaces rather than getting soaked. *

*Massachusettes Institute of Technology News

Bird Crashes into window /  by Chris Maynard

The Window uses a turkey and a swan feather

A songbird flies along on its migration at night. Like a moth at night, is attracted to light of a city. What looks like a clear way forward isn’t. This piece, the “Window”. was inspired by Miranda Brandon’s epic photographic series underscoring this threat.

What Do you Call a Feather in Different Languages? /  by Chris Maynard


I copied this off a site called Definitions.net

These are not hearts! /  by Chris Maynard

ruffed grouse body feathers

We make sense of the world through symbols. These are beautiful natural heart shapes but for a grouse, they are not likely symbols of love but useful for hiding, for camouflage.

108 Species of Starlings! /  by Chris Maynard

Did you know there are 108 species of Starlings? Most live in Africa. The science names of the starlings that donated these feathers for what I call my "Starling Poster" are:

Lamprotornis iris

L. nitens

L. purpureus

L. elizabeth

L. chakrurus

L. australis

L. acuticaudus

L. purpuroptera

L. regius

L. splendids

L. shelleyi

L. superbus

L. purpuriceps

L. ornatus

L. hidebranti

L. muesii

Cirmyricinolu leucogaster

Orychognathus walleri

Peoeptera stuhlmanni

Saroglossa spiloptera

These feathers were originally used in an ornithological study of feather evolution and were obtained from the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Shadows /  by Chris Maynard

Swan NIght Flight . Mute Swan body feathers

I owe a debt to shadows. Without them, my art would be flat and less appealing, poorer. As I think about this, I notice all around me the shadow of my fingers as I type on the keyboard; how the chair, the pencil, the wastebasket throw their bits of darkness to create a richer presence; that at night when the lights are off, I am enveloped in Earth’s shadow. I primarily work with feathers that usually symbolize the unshadowed part of existence like flight and air and light. Which is why shadows are so important in my work and life, to balance the light, the sky, and the heavens with the Earth and darkness.

Rattle the Cage, Birds as Pets /  by Chris Maynard

Rattle the Cage, from my sister in law’s pet Blue & Gold Macaw tail feathers

Three and a half million pet birds live in the USA.* These are mostly caged birds like parrots in homes, not chickens and ducks. The numbers are slightly less than 20 years ago but about 3 in every 100 households have a bird or two. Practically all these birds are bred in captivity, not from the wild. People get them from pet shop, friends, and rescue centers.

Like keeping dogs as pets, owners love them. But birds have wings, so everyone wants to see them be able to fly and they mostly can’t in captivity. So there is an element of sadness as in, Why Does the Caged Bird Sing?

My friend caught a baby starling and fed it by hand until it grew up in its cage by the front door. It learned to talk and imitate interesting noises. It could fake her voice. Her husband was occasionally fooled when the bird imitated the door opening and voiced “Hello honey!”

*2017 Pet Ownership and Demographic Sourcebook by the American Veterinary Medical Association.

Bird's Sense of Touch /  by Chris Maynard

We touch with our fingers and skin. Since birds’ skins are covered with feathers, this would seem to limit their sense of touch. But birds have tiny thin almost invisible feathers that likely help a bird be exquisitely sensitive to touch.

This is the best educated guess of the function of a certain type of small feather that grows next to the and underneath the big body and flight feathers that you see on the outside of a bird. They are called filoplumes. They look like very thin hairs with tufts at the end. The shafts are inserted right at the base of the body and flight feathers and into areas rich with sensory receptor nerves.

Here are a couple of ways they would work: If a body feather is out of place, the bird could feel it by the movement of tiny filoplume feathers next to it. The filoplume feathers likely act as levers enhancing the movement of the tip to the nerve-rich cells at the base where the shaft is inserted into the skin. Then the bird could know to ruffle its feathers or groom the out-of-place body feather into place.

And when flying, the filoplumes could, through the nerve receptors at their base right next to each big primary feather, tell the bird to adjust the angle of each feather according to the aerodynamic needs of flight.

*Spring 2020 issue of Living Bird Magazine

Filoplume illustration by Jen Lobo 2020

How Feathers Are The Same As Pine Needles /  by Chris Maynard

Feather shafts look kind of like these pine needles where they attach. Both feather and these pine needles move similarly. A biologist friend told me that the name of the pine needle connection is called a fascicular bundle. For a feather it is called the follicle sheath. It is where on a flight feather the skin that goes up the feather shaft like a sock on your leg and similar to the brown part where the pine needles attach.

Thank You Mister Turkey for Your Meat and Your Feathers /  by Chris Maynard

I use naturally shed feathers in most of my art, except for turkeys. I usually go to a friend’s little farm to get a turkey for the holidays. This time, she gave me her free-roaming two-year-old male whose feathers were in great beautiful shape. He was a heritage turkey which means he was smaller (14 pounds dressed) and more flavorful than ones selected and modified for quick growth that you get in the supermarket: the big broad-breasted white butterballs.

I tried raising a couple of those one year and became revolted at their quick growth because, if I did not kill and butcher them in 4 months, they literally would have grown too fat to walk.

Missing for 20 years /  by Chris Maynard

These three boxes full of feathers languished upstairs in my large barn for 20 years, pretty much forgotten. I rediscovered them last week as I was reorganizing stuff in the barn for a building project. They now hang by the entry to my studio, cleaned up and also reorganized. The feathers, 25 years ago when I assembled the boxes, were carefully selected to be legal to have. Some of them are from exotic pheasants that I had raised and some from aviaries and zoos.

How to see /  by Chris Maynard

We usually see what we think something should look like instead of really seeing what it is. Like this rabbit. Oh, I mean this duck.

Beginning drawing class students often realise this when their first sketches turn out poorly. This is because they are drawing what they think something should look like, from past experience. When they really look at the the lines and shadows and spaces of the object in front of them, their drawings improve dramatically.

This is a good lesson for life: like really try to listen rather than pre-think what a person is saying. Like setting aside assumptions, notions, and prejudices and instead look, listen, and be with a person, a cloud, a tree, or anything. It makes for a stronger presence.

How to Identify a Bird by Its Sound and Song /  by Chris Maynard

Identifying what bird is making that sound is easy. Use the phone app, MERLIN offered for free from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Here is a blurb from their website:

“Sound ID unlocks a whole new way of enjoying nature that produces not just one magical moment but many,” said Jessie Barry, program manager of the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab. “It really does feel like magic when you match a mystery sound with the name of the bird making it.”

Merlin makes it easy to identify birds as they’re singing. Simply hold up your smart phone, tap the Sound ID button, and Merlin shows you the name of each bird detected in real time, along with a photo to help you clinch the ID.

I tend to focus on my sense of sight. This app encourages me to open to the world of sound.

How to Fix A Chewed Feather Shaft /  by Chris Maynard

Parrots sometimes chew their feathers. When they shed them, the shafts are broken and ratty looking. Here, I cut the bottom hollow shaft of a turkey tail feather and simply pushed it over the parrot feather’s chewed shaft. A tiny dab of glue can hold it in place.

Vacheron Constantin: A Large Installation in NYC /  by Chris Maynard

I named it “Cycle”. The large colorful feather cutouts top right are not my design but were requested by Vacheron.

David Stark Design asked me to create a 21 foot high installation at the Swiss watchmaker’s store in New York City on 57th Street. So I did, working with a great team of people. I had to choose the largest of feathers to work with: The Great Argus Pheasant’s and remaining uncut are macaw tail feathers making a circle reminiscent of a sundial. This will be up through November 2022. Stop in!

I thought that the work would proceed promptly and on time. Well, we finished on time but getting there included last minute changes along the way but in the end, I am happy with it and everyone else is too.