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

How to fix a tattered, frayed feather

Kingfisher Preen.

Often your feather is not in the best shape. It can be trampled or tossed about by wind or wave and become frayed and tattered looking. The feather’s barbs and barbules (branches coming off the shaft) have little microscopic Velcro-type hooks which usually keep the them together and make a flat and even surface, the vane. But the hooks can come apart. You can often fix even really tattered feathers with steam. Though steam won’t repair a feather with worn down parts or missing pieces, it fixes feathers with barbs that don’t zip back together, repairs twisted and wavy feathers, and straightens out unnatural bends and curls.

A steam iron works well, but I like to use the steaming spout of a teapot. Just be careful—use a glove so you don’t get scalded. You are really using a combination of heat and steam. Move the feather slowly back and forth in the steaming spout for a few seconds. Pinch the barbs next to the shaft and gently squeeze, then pull away toward the feather’s edge—in the same direction a bird preens. This YouTube video gives you the idea in about a minute and a half, though it goes for eight minutes.

Duck Rain

Rain Duck

Our last long spell of rain lasted for weeks. I put on my rubber boots and raincoat to watch the ducks swim. Their bodies, wrapped inside warm and waterproof shingles of feathers, were warm and dry. Even though I wore a sweaters and long johns, rubber boots, rain jacket hat and hood, I felt not as well equipped.

Where do birds go when they die?

Loon Star.

If heaven is something a bird ever imagines, I don’t think it would be a place with clouds. Clouds are part of birds’ lives, they fly around in them. Especially during our rainy-cloudy season. We can’t fly, so those of us (probably who live in dryer climates) place fluffy clouds along with angel wings and feathers in the heavens, or at least as bridges between worlds.

I was taking a nice warm morning indoor shower, thinking of these things and thinking how I could use feather in art to describe a bird’s heaven. I recently sketched a series with cloud/rain themes. My inspiration usually arrives as intuition rather than a specific meaning I want to convey. But in the shower, it was as if the clouds suddenly cleared and the stars appeared. I thought, “If a bird had a heaven in its yearnings, it is stars, not clouds.”

This thought, I admit, was probably heavily influenced by the several weeks of constant rain and cloud cover in my area of the world. The sun did shine for an hour yesterday one morning. Like cave-dwelling dwarves, people came out of their houses, squinting and shading their eyes, happy to see beyond the clouds into the heavens.

A Beating Heart

Cockatoo heart.

Happy Valentine’s Day! Who knows if heart symbol-shapes mean the same thing to birds as they do to us. Probably not. Even though birds’ hearts are similar in shape and function to ours, they are relatively bigger. They pump more blood and usually beat faster—a lot faster, 1250 beats per minute for an active hummingbird. But when a hummingbird rests at night, the heartbeat goes down to only 50 beats a minute! I wonder how much faster a hummingbird heart beats when it wakes up, and sees its mate, its valentine.

Look what I found hiding in this feather

This short video shows some of my process of cutting a turkey tail feather to bring out a little bird.

Everyone knows penguins as land waddlers but what fascinates me most is how well they swim. On a trip to the zoo, I watched and took pictures through an underwater viewing window. I envisioned these birds chasing schools of baitfish, even though the zoo keeper was feeding them dead herring or anchovies.

Later, I examined a stuffed Adelle penguin. Like the turkey, its tail feathers are the bird’s longest at five inches. The penguin uses these thick-shafted feathers not for display or flight but to make a three-legged stool: two feet and the tail.

An industrial chicken feather problem

Rooster feathers.

From 50 billion chickens killed each year, industrial farmers around the world throw away almost all of their feathers: 8 billion pounds into landfills. The chicken farming business is so competitive that farmers make only a few cents on each bird. farmers would rather sell the feathers than throw them away. There is hope: universities and private research labs are busy finding ways to transform feather proteins into usable products; some are finding their way into the market, but most are in development to make them economically vialble. Here is a list of what I found trolling the WEB for a few minutes:

fertilizer ● animal feed ● extracts for liquid and solid fuel ● hydrogen fuel storage ●  insulation ● absorbent materials for diapers and environmental contaminants such as radioactive strontium and cesium ● ingredients in paints ● filters ● mats for erosion control ● paper ● stuffing for furniture and mattresses ● moldable thermoplastics for soles of shoes, cups and plates, furniture, roofing, and for auto parts such as dashboards ● ingredients in cosmetics ● clothing ● boat construction (mixed with fiberglass ● and circuit boards.

Manufactures will soon take advantage of the special forms of protein found in feathers by grinding, mixing, heating, and formulating them with other chemicals to make feathers a bigger part of your life in the near future.  Perhaps when writing a future blog article, I will use a keyboard made out of feather plastic, use a computer with circuitry made in part from feathers, and sit on a chair made of feathers, stuffed with ground and re-purposed feathers.

Population problems and chickens

Green junglefowl feathers, chicken feathers.

We humans, being quite inventive creatures, have successfully increased our population to over 7 billion. A lot of our inventions and population increase depend on fossil fuels. Where would we be without use of gas and oil to make fertilizers, to transport raw and finished materials, and to manufacture about everything?

If a certain measure of success is how many there are of an animal, chickens have got us beat. At any one time, 19 billion chickens live in the world according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. In a sense, they are using us. Like we are dependent on oil, they are dependent on us for their population success.

Where would chickens be without us?  Probably where they started: a few relatively small populations of the four species of junglefowl, all in Asia. They look a lot like chickens. The feathers shown here are from a male green junglefowl who sports a beautiful pink, turquoise, and yellow comb on his head.

Next: what to do with all the chicken feathers?

Sources: 1. Howman, Pheasants of the World, 1993 and UN Food and Agriculture Organization http://faostat3.fao.org/browse/Q/QA/E

Mistake

Quails-in-process mistake.

It’s funny, but when cutting detailed bird shapes out of feathers, I make very few cutting blunders.

When something has my full attention, mistakes become unlikely. When I make one, it is either a result of inattention to detail, skipping a step in the process, or because I am exploring the “cutting” edge of learning.

I cut the wrong side of one of these feathers when I skipped the step of checking my preliminary sketch to see where to make each cut. An artist, using oils or acrylics, can just paint over mistakes; or even paint over an entire piece. With a feather, an error means starting over. I am looking for a similar feather to replace this one that I ruined.

Blunders like this put me in mind of the process of evolution. A fault in a creature’s body usually makes life harder. The creature dies or doesn’t reproduce more of its kind because the mistake gets in the way. However, once in a great while, one of these errors makes life easier, more effective, better. I haven’t experienced a cutting-feathers-mistake contributing to better art…yet; though every once in a while, I seem to try.

These are guinea hen wing feathers. The piece, once I find a replacement feather, will be 30 by 20 inches, picturing California quails flying up into the circle of feathers.

The Feather Religion

Tundra Swan

“The power of the wind was in the feather which he made you hold in your hand.”

— from a participant in The Feather Religion, 1905, Klickitat, WA, USA

Klickitat native Jake Hunt started this religion between 1898 and 1904. This was a during a generation of northwest USA natives who were experiencing huge changes in their cultures as European descendants restricted their ways of life and access to resources. It was related to the Washani (which also uses eagle feathers) and later, to the Shaker Native American religion.

An eagle feather was held in each hand and a person would spin. Songs were sung, drums played, and feathers waved to keep time. The feathers were used to brush sickness off the body and worn in the hair in prescribed ways as reminders of the powers of feathers, or at least by association, eagles.

“It seemed as though I were traveling as I had never traveled before because in my hand I held the feather…and it was leading me on.”

Quotes collected from Alice DuBois, The Feather Cult of the Middle Columbia, 1938, General Series in Anthropology, George Banta Publishing Co.

Book has arrived! Feathers Form and Function

My new and first book is here: Feathers Form and Function. I am excited to be able to offer a profusion of my art and my thoughts about feathers all in one place. You will find quality in the design, the printing, and the materials used; and the way the printed colors accurately reflect the art. I undertook writing this book a year ago by gathering my previously published short articles, including some from this blog, researching, and mostly, regular writing appointments with my computer and notebook. The easy part was supplying the designers with art which I did up until the last minute so my latest works could be included in the book.

This website's book page describes the contents in more detail and provides an easy place to get a signed copy.

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.