The Brightest White Feathers Known

Woodcock tail feather, underside.

The underside tips of Woodcock tail feathers were measured to be 30% brighter than any other know white in feathers.

Many birds signal with white patches on their wings or tails. For birds that fly in the lower light of evenings, like Woodcocks, the white probably must be even brighter. But during the day when the bird needs to be inconspicuous, the white could attract unwanted attention, so the bright white is on the underside of the tail feathers, hidden from sight.

How this brilliant white is produced may be of interest. The scientific article in this link explains this in detail. Here is a quote from the article: “This intense reflectance is the result of incoherent light scattering from a disordered nanostructure composed of keratin and air within the barb rami. In addition, the flattening, thickening, and arrangement of those barbs creates a Venetian-blind-like macrostructure that enhances the surface area for light reflection.”

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.12.09.519795v2.full

Stickiness, reposted from 2014

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

Stickiness reposted from 2014

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

Art and Music

Art is a language without words. So is music. Both can go where words cannot. Birds make sophisticated and complex sounds—music. Although it is hard to put their songs in our musical scales and ledgers like I have tried to do here.

Round Raven

This cut peacock feather is a bit abstract, a little more divorced from my real experience with the birds themselves. I enjoy making these kinds of designs but find it is difficult to incorporate them into larger pieces where I want the inspiration to arise more from my knowledge of, experience with, and respect for the birds themselves. Placing this design on a few black T-shirts, I gave a few to my friends.

Ravens in Color

Ravens don't migrate much. They don't fly in flocks much either. And they appear as jet black to us. So this piece is all wrong!

However, Ravens' feathers sport a sheen that reflects light not as black but ephemeral colors like green, lavender, blue, copper, and purple. In addition, Ravens likely see much more color in the feathers of their fellows than we do. This is because they see the four "primary" colors of ultraviolet in addition to the yellow, red, and blue colors that we see. Like yellow and red mixes into orange, ultraviolet combines with the other colors to create rich tapestries that we can only imagine. 

How I Organize Writing an Art Book

It is hard to organize a book into a pleasantly flowing story. Especially with over two hundred images of my art! I printed the spreadsheet of images and associated writing, cut it up, and placed each part on a three-foot, one meter high piece of card-stock paper with removable glue. I found it much easier to envision the book when I can see everything at once and move it with my hands. I can move pieces according to the writing and the image themes, colors, subject matter, flow, and many other considerations. At the end, I would have had a book well over three hundred pages! That is too big for the table top art book that I envision, and too pricey. Instead, I will be breaking it up into four books! The first one will be out in mid-2026. The theme is Meaning, since feathers have so much symbology for people around the world. The second one will be about Flight. The third about Biology, and for fourth about my Art process.

My first book, Feathers Form and Function has been out of print for two years and I am thinking of having a small run made so they will be available again. What do you think?

Creative Patience

I hear from writers that they often find it helpful to let their writing sit for an hour, a day, or more. When they come back, they hope to see it afresh. Often they quickly realize what needs improvement and how to fix it. I do the same with this blog.

I also do it with my art. I struggled toward placing the 15 cutout cranes in this piece but was not satisfied. After three days I tried again. A few days later after a third try I was pleased.

The process is pleasing also. Sort of a discipline. I have to let go getting immediate results, delaying my gratification over completing each piece. The result is always better.

Pelicanesis

Life offers two features in abundance: beauty and horror. So how does a sane person cope? Focus on one side of this, the beauty? Watch horror movies?  Emphasize sacredness and specialness of existence? For me, I find an underlying theme of humor provides some balance. People often say that my pieces have a bit of comedy. I don’t usually try to do that but I like it when a piece makes me smile. Especially when the title fits.

Bone Feathers

Each of the bird’s flight feathers is attached to the wing bone. You know how a bird folds its wings to its body when it lands? And how a feather spreads out evenly when it opens its wings to fly? There is a ligiment that runs the entire way along the forward edge of the wing so the feathers spread out evenly when the bird opens its wings.

It is not only feathers that make a bird fly. They are only the most obvious. The entire bird’s body is adapted for flying—like lite and hollow bones and the way the bones are shaped to attach the muscles. Birds also have special ways of breathing to assist in powering muscles for flight. They have skeletons where much of the back bones fused as one to help keep them stable during flight. As such, their bodies are sort of football shaped. To have flexibility, they have long necks with perhaps three times as many vertebrae as us. They have no teeth, that would be too heavy. Instead they have bills made out of keratin, the same substance that their feathers are made of but arranged in a very different way.

The Perfect Feather

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Finding the perfect feather…

A perfect feather can be hard to find. Birds wear their feathers for about a year before they they grow new ones and shed the old, so of course shed feathers are worn. These shed Mountain Peacock Pheasants are often notoriously too messed up for my art. I can try to preen them with my fingers to get them in better shape. But of this whole pile of feathers, I found only two that I could possibly use.

Feather Wall Installations

Much of my work has been contained in shadowboxes with museum acrylic protection. But the work is durable enough for wall installations which I have been doing more of this year. This work was installed in the Beverly Hills area of Los Angeles during the 2025 January fires!

Feather Support

Katrina von Gruow wrote and illustrated The Unfeathered Bird in which she arranged birds without skin and often only the bones into poses of activity like flight. She agreed for me to stylize some of her illustrations into carved feathers. After all, this is what is underneath all those feathers that allows the bird to power flight.

Although we don't often see them because they live over open ocean, the small Wilson's Storm Petrel is among the most abundant of birds. They flutter about like butterflies, not so much landing on the water but dancing with their feet on the surface of the wave troughs. 

This Bird Sheds More Than Feathers

Top: Grouse foot in summer. Bottom: Grouse foot in winter

Grouse have these millipede-like growths on their toes in the winter, presumably to act like snowshoes. In the spring, they are shed in a yearly molt like the bird sheds its feathers every year. Only the toe growths don’t grow back until the next fall. I probably won’t be doing anything with them like I do with shed feathers!

A limit as a Creative Prompt

Split Moon, Crowned Crane secondary wing feather

Ideas and inspirations come through many channels. It isn’t the artist doing it but being open up to possibilities and being part of a conduit. Feathers though, present a challenge because they only come in the natural colors and sizes that the bird grows

So the feathers as my medium set severe limits. When I am inspired, I have to figure out how to accomplish an inspiration using only feathers as my line, form, color and size. So I need to approach this type of design problem from many angles. I sketch many possible ideas knowing most of them will not work. It is kind of like a brain storm in my sketchbook

Phoenix Flamingo

Female Red-tailed Cockatoo tail feather carved into the likeness of a Phoenix

The family name for Flamingoes is Phoenicopterae, from the word phoenix.

It makes sense in a way because these birds live in fire, sort of. They inhabit environments that are too extreme for any other bird or mammal. They gather and breed in super salty and alkaline environments that would quickly kill other creatures. They can drink very hot water, close to boiling. As Katrina von Gruow writes in The Unfeathered Bird, “Flamingoes are really very special birds indeed and, with their carmine wings, emerging from the intense chemical heat of the tropical salt lakes, certainly worthy of the name “phoenix".”

A Tongue in the Shape of a Feather

Look at this Toucan’s tongue! A feathered bird with a feathery tongue. A toucan’s beak can be as long as its body and comes with a tongue to match. The bird seems to use it as a tool to get sticky food down its throat as well as to taste the food before deciding to swallow it or not.

Creative Inspiration in a Feather

Sunrise study #1

An artist gets inspiration from many sources: other artists, the natural world, animals, people, and many others. I got this inspiration from the top feather. To me, it was so obviously like a sunrise that it practically dictated this piece. That’s the thing about perfect natural feathers, am not going to paint a sunset on a feather because I want to honor the natural color. Both feathers are from an Amazon Parrot, about five inches long so the final piece is only 5 x 7 inches.

Raven Spins the World

Raven Spins the World, 13 x 21 inches using Great Argus feathers

We make stories as an important way of making sense of the world and take them seriously even though they are never perfect reflections of reality. Like when someone tailgates me, I think “they are doing this on purpose to bother me” when most likely the tailgater either has a bad habit or is just absorbed with getting somewhere. It probably has nothing to do with intentionally trying to bother me.

This seriousness about our stories partly why I like to make up stories that are not so serious. Like this title which could be part of a larger story.

The Axolotl, Feathered Lungs

I’m attracted to feathery shapes and feather analogies. While a bird’s feathers allow the bird to live in two mediums: on land and in the air; the Axolotl’s feathery gills allow them to live their lives in the water even though they also have lungs and can breathe air like us. These creatures lived in a couple of lakes near Mexico City but now they are mostly gone. However, they are easily bred and genetically manipulated so are abundant in the pet trade. Unlike feathers, these frilly fills are never shed so I wouldn’t use them in my art!