Pigeon Guillemots and Their Red Feet

Close Call study

I wanted to exaggerate these birds’ bright red feet because they are such a striking part of this black-feathered bird.

Like in life, art, and disputes, I find it useful to get different perspectives. It broadens my understanding. But it isn’t always as easy as the changes I made to the drawing of the Pigeon Guillemot. In this piece one sees from the perspective of the fish, the bird’s food. I usually think about this bird and how it goes about its life, wondering what it is like being this feathered creature. But what is life like for this bottom dwelling fish who may at any moment during the day, get snatched up to the surface, crushed in this bird’s beak? And then I wonder what my life would be like if I was stalked by creatures with a fondness for my flesh. I think for one, that I would be much more of aware of my physical surroundings, maybe watch less TV, and spend less time writing blogs.

How to Make a Feather

This is a wooden child growth feather sold on Etsy

Since most birds shed and regrow feathers year to year, it is helpful to know how to make them. Both feathers and hair are made with the same thing: a protein called keratin. To make a hair, you more or less start by just stacking one protein on top of another within a follicle in the skin.

• To make a feather, stack proteins on top of each other in a circle from a the nubbin or follicle inside the bird’s skin.

• Route a small blood vessel to each follicle to supply the nourishment to each feather as it grows.

• Make sure you cut off the supply when the feather achieves full growth or else the bird could bleed to death if a large feather is pulled out.

Once the feather is grown and blood supply is cut off, the feather is fully functional.

If it should get pulled out, just start the process of making a new feather all over again, immediately. If the feather merely breaks but the shaft remains in the skin, you will have to wait until the year’s next feather pushes the shaft out.

When you get really good at making feathers, please tell me how you get the same pattern and color in each feather every time they shed. And how do you get the same matching feathers on each side of the bird?

No matter how much I read about feather growth, it still seems like a wonderful mystery.

Check out this feather growth animation on YouTube. It was made by Matthew Harris, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Why Starfish Look Like Stars

My Friend and author Maria Ruth is writing a book about Pigeon Guillemots and diving deep into her subject. She and her crew are doing original research, learning about this bird’s behavior, habits, adaptability, and the sounds they make.

One noticeable thing about these birds is their bright red feet. So I found one of the only larger feathers with red on one side of the shaft and black on the other that could lend themselves to creating these red feet on the black body: the Amazon Parrot secondary wing feathers. I titled this piece, Guillemot Creates Starfish. Just a note: the Guillemot likely did not create starfish by pulling down the stars, that was the direction of my creativity. But I am not ruling it out. Who knows what Maria will next discover about these birds? Look for her book in 2025 from the publisher, The Mountaineers.

A Moth with "Feathers" for Wings.

Top: the moth genus Alucidae or many feathered moth. Bottom: the genus Pterophorus or white-plumed moth.

A lot of research has focused on how fethers accomplish flight for birds. It would be an interesting school project to learn how these “feathers” help a moth to fly. Some questions I would ask is how do these feather-type wings differ from the flat-wings of most moths in flight? How are these feather-type wings similar and how are they different from bird’s feathers? And how do bird feathers assist flight compared to how these moth “feathers” help the moth fly. Perhaps some background research into how insects and birds use their muscles to fly would be helpful because the larger birds and smaller insects use their muscles very differently to achieve flight.

In science circles it is called convergent evolution when similar things evolve separately in different creatures such as these feather—looking wings on the moths.

Similarities Between Trees and Roots and Feathers and Birds

Trees as we usually think of them are these big trunks and branches. These are in a way, just the food gathering mouth-parts to serve the roots underground. The roots connect to water, soil, and creatures that break down organic matter and rock so it is available to the roots. Feathers are the same in a way. Each shed feather has a trunk-- the shaft, branches – the barbs, and twigs and branchlets, the barbules. But where are the bird’s roots? The roots of a feather is the bird itself which provides the nutrients for the feather to grow and anchors the feather to its grounding in the bird’s body.

Bird Food

Goldfinch Food, Amazon Parrot tail feathers, 10 x 12 inches

In a sense, the seeds of the dandelion, when they are eaten by a goldfinch, get reconstituted into the bird’s feathers. My themes always have to do with birds. I find it perfectly acceptable to carve the birds’ food in this piece without carving the bird images themselves. However, I did make two large takeoffs on this with flying goldfinches accompanied by dandelion seeds whisked away in the wind. One is pictured on my website home page.

White Bird Dance Awards

Portland Oregon is the western US center for dance performance because of the efforts of two men. Paul King and Walter Jaffe created White Bird Dance to promote dance including importing world class dance companies to Portland.

White Bird Dance company asks me yearly to create four carved feather pieces in frames to present to people who are influential in bringing the art of dance into the world.

I was impressed this year at the fall fundraising event when Mikhail Baryshnikov spoke, appreciating the efforts of Paul and Walter. The awards have gone to dance choreographers like Paul Taylor and Twyla Tharp. This year one of the awards went to Virginia Johnson who just retired as the artistic director of the Dance Theater of Harlem.

Article published for Orion Magazine

This article for Orion Magazine is titled “The Life Cycle of a Feather”. I write about why feathers are important to me and as symbols for us, my inspirations, and a little about the process of creating.

Five Million Tonnes of Feathers Wasted! What To Do?

It surprises me that little is done to use the millions of tonnes of the world’s chicken byproduct—feathers. For fifteen years I have read about optimistic research into how to use feathers in a productive way instead of sending them to landfills. Some farmers use them as low-grade feed but it is usually cheaper for them to just bury the feathers in a landfill. Researches have come up with many other ways to re-use feathers in industial processes but I can’t find any major way they are actually doing it on a big scale.

You can read about investigations into industrially processing feathers to form different kinds of plastics for uses from flowerpots to automobile dashboards. Or just made into plastic biodegradable pellets that can be made into many things. Just search, “industrial feather waste use”.

This truck full of waste feathers tipped over a few years ago on the highway north of where I live.

Stop Motion of a Large Piece

Feather carving

In the stop motion video, you can see the progression of placement and cuts. For me, what really stands out is how the feathers and the cutout birds pop out at the end when they are elevated. The shadows give the work an added dimension.

A big piece like this usually comes after making several smaller pieces where the design concepts are tested. It took a while to collect enough of the right feathers—these are all from the right side of the wing of molluccan cockatoos. Some were shed from a pet bird over several years and some shed in a nonprofit rehabilitation sanctuary for parrots.

I often show a playful element in my work. Playfulness allows me to learn new things and skills without being too tense, like young swallows just off the nest learning to fly. They often play with an airborne feather (that I provide), catching it in their beaks on the wing, dropping it, and picking it up again and again. I bet they were enjoying improving their flying and bug catching skills.

This large almost five-foot piece will be for sale in Arts Council of Big Sky Montana at their February 2024 event.

Light a Fire

Phoenix, female Red-tail Black Cockatoo tail feather

Phoenix . female red-tail black cockatoo tail feather 

To make a fire, you can use a bunch of dry fluffy feathers as a fire starter. This worked almost as well as paper in my wood stove.

For most people, paper is easier to come by. But for me and say, a chicken farmer, feathers are a ready source. One caution: a lot of down feathers floating around as you strike a match could cause something like a slow explosion. If that happened, you might need to rise from the ashes like a Phoenix.

A Vegetarian Bird

Singer, Embarrassed Goldfinch

Goldfinches are one of the most vegetarian of birds. They eat seeds mostly, regurgitating them to feed their young, pulling seeds out of thistles, and all sorts of plants. I watch them out my dining room window hanging rightside up and upside down on thin swaying stalks of seed pods of cornflowers. Reading about them, I learned a new name for their vegetarian style of eating: granivores.

This feather carving isn’t yellow! I couldn’t find an appropriate small yellow feather so I just used this one and called the bird embarrassed.

Terres, John K. (1980). The Audubon Society Encyclopedia of North American Birds. New York: Knopf. p. 329. ISBN 978-0-394-46651-4.

Swiftest Flight

Swiftly, Crowned Crane secondary wing feathers

The swifts are little jet fighters of the bird world. Kayaking down the Cispus River, I gazed at dozens of Vaux Swifts flying above me along the river corridor. That is, when I wasn’t avoiding boulders and white water drops. These bird grow wing bones shaped differently than swallows which they otherwise sort of look like. It makes them look like fast jets and they fly like it. And they fly high and for up to 10 months without landing, drinking, feeding, molting, mating, and probably sleeping on the wing. I read on BBC Science Focus that during a lifetime, they can fly as far as to the moon and back seven times!.

I returned from the river and made this piece. The birds move and turn so quickly, they seem to just disappear all of a sudden, much like the Starship Enterprise when it goes into warp speed.

Recycling Feathers

Preen detail, Capercaillie tail feather

A cool thing about shed feathers is that they keep their complex structural integrity yet the bird that shed them has already grown new replacements so it doesn’t need the old feathers. They usually fall to the ground to feed small creatures that decompose them breaking the feathers into small components that can be used by plants as nutrients. Then the plants or its fruits and seeds are eaten by creatures like insect which the birds eat to grow their new feathers.

I recycle feathers into my art but it is only a matter of time (hopefully hundreds of years) before my art and the feathers in the shadow-boxes become small components of dirt to be absorbed by plant roots

Decompositional bacteria eat the feathers—even on feathers growing on live birds. They do it by using an enzyme (keratinase) that decays the keratin that feathers are made of. Fortunately for the birds, they can pretty much stop this degradation of their feathers from happening. Part of a bird’s feather care routine while preening is to rub and preen bacteria inhibiting oil that is produced by a gland near its tail on its feathers. When a bird preens in this way, it’s kind of like seeing actor George Clooney combing his treasured Dapper Dan hair gel through his hair in the movie, Oh Brother Where Art Thou.

See this write-up and more references for detail on feather decomposition by bacteria. https://microbewiki.kenyon.edu/index.php/Feather-Decomposing_Bacteria

What Is Up?

Around We Go

I’ve been feeling disoriented when thinking about our concepts of Up and Down. We need to orient ourselves in the world in order to make sense of it. So we make up stories for how the world is. Like existence having an up and down. But it doesn’t. The earth turns around in space amid the solar system and galaxy amid multiple galaxies. Another story we could make up which could feel just as true could be that instead of standing on the earth, we are hanging upside down, pulled by gravity. Then the Earth would be up, where heaven resides and hell would be the space below: space. Imagine that. You might feel disoriented.

Disorientation can be a good thing because it lets us experience the world in a fresh way, perhaps encouraging a sense of wonder and curiosity

As I think of this alternate way of perceiving up and down, I wonder what a flying bird’s take would be. After all, they fly in more of a three dimensional space than us, but like us, always oriented by gravity. Do they worship the earth and think that is where they want to go after they die instead of up into the clouds? I mean, they already have access to the clouds, sort of. Maybe they know something we don’t about the nature of what it is like there. But then again, isn’t the idea of heaven our story also?

Like I said, thinking about this stuff is disorienting.

Changing Times

Where I live is changing. For one, more people move here which means houses and apartments are popping up like mushrooms and cars crowd the roads, all making less room for wild. Because I am connected to this place, I notice what to many might seem like small changes. Thirty years ago, little herring would school under the Olympia docks at end of the Puget Sound, now named the Salish Sea. I used to catch resident king salmon that were feeding on herring underneath the docks. I don’t see the herring anymore. Instead a more pollution-tolerant fish called Sticklebacks schools in big numbers. 

I adapted my art in the piece pictured in the header to this changing scene. The Red-Breasted Merganser, who has wintered here probably from time immemorial, also adapts. I don’t know if they even eat sticklebacks which are, well, stickley, as well as much smaller than the herring and other fish that they are known to eat. 

These and other changes have me feeling like sort of an in-place refugee. I wonder if the Red Breasted Mergansers feel the same.

Without Feathers, We Are Naked

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?

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

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

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.