Introduction

Glenn Adamson

Adolphe Philippe Millot (French, 1857–1921), Illustration of Feathers and Birds, ca.1923. Lithograph. Credit: Private Collection Prismatic Pictures / Bridgeman Images.

A resplendent quetzal (Pharomachrus mocinno) perched on a branch, its long tail hanging down in an elegant s-curve: it’s the very definition of sitting pretty. The bird ranges from Mexico to Panama, living mainly in cloud forest habitats. As with many avian species, the female is earth-toned in color. But the male! It is exquisiteness incarnate, crested in gold, bright ruby at its belly, with amazingly intense emerald-green tail feathers, which grow up to three feet long in mating season.

It was Darwinian evolution that brought this marvel into the world – but people who decided it was magic. The name of the bird is derived from the Nahuatl word quetza, “to raise, or lift,” making it conceptually synonymous with transcendence itself. In keeping with this association, ancient American civilizations accorded the quetzal a very special place. Its feathers, alongside those of scarlet macaws, roseate spoonbills, and other brightly colored species, were used for ceremonial headdresses and clothing. When poets were depicted in speech, green-blue scrolls were shown issuing from their mouths to suggest that their words were flying up to the heavens.

A compound deity was made of the quetzal by combining it with a snake. Called Quetzalcoatl by the Aztec, Kʼukʼulkan by the Maya, this powerful god embodied the force of creation itself, and presided over agriculture, the sun and wind, and all the human crafts. The “Feathered Serpent” was understood as existing in opposition to Tezcatlipoca (“Smoking Mirror”), the personification of war, night, and sacrifice – identified with the volcanic glass obsidian, as we discussed in our issue on that material.

Is it any wonder that feathers should inspire such reverence? After all, they impart the power of flight, and that once seemed miraculous. Until 1783, when the Montgolfier brothers engineered their first untethered balloon trip (a sheep, a duck and a cockerel were on board, and arrived safely to ground eight minutes after takeoff), birds, bats and insects were the only sentient creatures that could take to the air. And who aspires to a bat or a bug? “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers - that perches in the soul,” Emily Dickinson famously wrote, and that notion has found its way into the metaphorical repertoire of nearly every culture.

Christianity has its angels, of course, which in the middle ages were sometimes depicted not only as having wings, but as covered with feathers from the neck down. The ancient Romans made a cautionary tale of skyward ambition in the story of Icarus, whose wings of real feathers inset into yellow beeswax melt away when he flies too close to the sun. (The real waxwing, so named because its feathers are tipped in the color of red sealing wax, has no such troubles.) The Han dynasty Chinese conjured the pixiu, a mythical beast with the wings of a bird, the body of a lion, the antlers of a deer, and the head of a dragon; symbolic of wealth, it was said to have an insatiable appetite for gold and jewels. In the traditional religion of both the Yoruba and Igbo peoples of present-day Nigeria, hens are often ritualistically sacrificed, and the feathers of eagles and parrots incorporated into ceremonial regalia.

Peacock feathers are also a longstanding emblem of kingship in India, and the bird is strongly associated with Shiva, the cosmic creator of the Hindu pantheon. The Peacock Throne, completed in 1635 after seven years of work under the direction of master artisan Said Gilani, served as the regal seat of the Mughal empire until it was looted in a Persian invasion, its gold and jewels eventually stripped and dispersed. A humble manifestation of power known in the British Isles is the “witch’s ladder,” a simple arrangement of rope and cock’s feathers to which various spell-casting powers have been attributed. (One example, found hidden in an attic in Somerset and now in the Pitts-River Museum, Oxford, was “said to have been used for getting away the milk from neighbors’ cows.”)

Still today, in common English, feathers stand for our various states of mind. They are what we imagine putting in our caps when we’re successful, what gets ruffled when we’re annoyed, what we’re knocked over with when astonished. This edifice of mythology and metaphor rests on an organic structure of incredible complexity. If you’re not an ornithologist (or a paleontologist, because some dinosaurs were also feathered), you likely have no clear understanding of how birds actually manage to fly, though Wikipedia does a pretty good job of explaining it. In brief, they have two types of flight feathers, rather wonderfully called “remiges and retrices,” from the Latin words for “oarsmen and helmsmen.” The remiges, positioned on the wing, provide thrust and lift. The retrices, on the tail, help with steering and braking. The body of a bird also has two basic types of feather: soft down on the underside, for warmth, and contour feathers, which provide streamlining and waterproofing.

Wild roosters standing off in Austrailia. Photo: Alamy.

Each individual feather can further be divided into parts. The central shaft, or rachis, ends in a quill which is anchored into a raised follicle in the bird’s skin. This quill portion is naturally hollow, so it can be filled with ink and used to write. (The word “pen” is in fact derived from the Latin penna, “feather”; etymologically speaking, the phrase “quill pen” is redundant.) On either side of the shaft is a vane composed of fine barbs, which in turn have even finer barbules, which hook on to one another almost like a zipper. This arrangement may call to mind a branching tree – about as flightless an object as nature has to offer – but it is what gives the bird lift, as the dense, light crosshatching catches the air.

It is worth noting that feathers aren’t really a material, in the sense that gold, wood, or polypropylene are. They are almost entirely made of keratin – the same fibrous protein that makes up hair, fur, hooves, horns, scales, fingernails, spiderwebs, whale baleen, and the exterior epidermis of human skin – with small amounts of oily lipids that bind the material, and trace elements that provide coloration. Both tough and flexible, keratin is an ideal substance if you want to, say, stay aloft in a stiff headwind, or fly continuously for up to two months, taking micro powernaps along the way.

Intriguingly, all the characteristics that make feathers so useful for birds – their lightness, strength, pliability, and polychromy – are the very things that commend them to artisans. It is striking how often featherwork mimics avian morphology, whether in wing-like fans, crest-like headpieces, or tail-like whisks used for shooing away insects (which an actual bird might just eat). Garments made by Tupinambá featherworkers make implicit comparison between the lifecycles of birds and people: bonnets of parrot-down for infants, soft as a newborn chick; sleek capes for adults that give the appearance of a scarlet ibis. Indigenous Hawai’ians, who make such whisks (they are called kalili there), are also known for making whole garments from dyed or naturally colored feathers, tying them into a woven ground much as a bird’s are connected to its epidermis. And a featherbed stuffed with down is soft and warm, just like the underbelly of a mother hen nesting on her own eggs.

An especially intriguing example of this affinity is the fletching of arrows, as well as other similar projectile weapons like darts and atlatls. Badminton shuttlecocks, though known as “birdies,” and possibly developed from lures used in training hunting hawks). In all these cases, attached feathers assist in stabilizing flight. Typically three trimmed vanes are used, one from a cock at the top, two from a hen below, the difference quickly signaling to the archer how to nock the arrow.

This technology goes a long, long way back. In 1991 a 5300-year old man was discovered in thawing ice in the Alps near the Austrian-Italian border. He was discovered with a full quiver made of animal skin, containing arrows both finished and in-process. The fletching, trimmed with a flint blade, was found still attached to the hazelwood arrow shafts with birch tar, further secured with a spiral binding of hair. This iceman also had an arrowhead buried in his back, suggesting how he ended up in a high mountain pass; live by the bow, die by the bow.

This prehistoric hunter might well have been out hunting when he died, and in this respect he is an ancestor of 200 subsequent generations of ever more efficient bird-killers. It is estimated that every year, about 70 billion chickens globally are consumed for their meat, not counting those destroyed in the egg industry. Before all those hens can be broiled, fried, or pulverized into a beige paste and turned into nuggets, they must be plucked. On a traditional farm, this is done by submerging a slaughtered chicken in a bath of hot water, loosening the feathers and makinges them easy to remove. In a factory, the birds are scalded in huge tubs and then placed in a plucking machine with rubber rollers, capable of processing several thousand chickens per hour.

In theory, all those stripped feathers could be put to use – in pillows, diapers, and insulation, or ground up into a meal that can be used for fertilizer or cattle feed. In practice, however, a high percentage of waste feathers are incinerated, introducing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The poultry industry is currently working on ways to reduce this climate impact, while also getting more financial “bang for the cluck.” The brittle quills of the feathers aren’t good for much, but the softer barbs can be combined with synthetics to make thread and solid plastics. One group of researchers has even found that keratin gleaned from chicken feathers makes a serviceable material for hydrogen fuel cells; another has blended the material with soybeans to create circuit boards.

Avian imitation is taking a similarly high-tech turn. The nanostructures that account for the iridescence of some birds prove to be useful for both batteries and water filters. Penguin feathers are providing inspiration for the development of ice shedding meshes which could be of use in power lines, wind turbines, airborne drones, and airplane wings. We also may soon experience a much larger-scale episode of birdlike behavior, with many sociologists predicting a huge rise in human migration to avoid flooding, drought, and rising heat. Such mass displacement would be comparable in its vectors to the seasonal journeys that birds, who take no notice of national borders, have always taken in search of food and livable temperatures. Seeing how they react to the changing environment is the global equivalent of the proverbial canary in the coalmine.

As is so often the case of social relations with the natural world, we tend to offset depredation with fascination. About a third of Americans say they do at least some birdwatching and backyard feeding – there was a significant and lasting increase as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic – and the pastime is apparently gaining popularity among millennials as a way to “unplug from the endless bombardment of tech.” Identifying birds by their plumage, along with their shapes, songs, and behavior, is an especially gentle application of material intelligence. It’s usually possible to distinguish species just from a single feather lying on the ground, though this may require close examination. The wing feathers of an owl are similar in shape, color, and marking to those of a pheasant, for example, but the edges of an owl feather will be softer to the touch, with serrations for silent flight.

Perhaps predictably, tech is now bombarding the world of birdwatching, with new apps that can instantly identify birds from a photograph. But this can be beneficial, as information gathered on such digital platforms can inform population studies that track climate impact: citizen science in action. And the more we learn about birds and their feathers, the better. Scientists are only now beginning to understand how starlings and other species manage to move en masse so quickly and precisely, executing breathtaking hairpin turns in unison without colliding – an important survival tactic when predators are near. Mathematically it’s complicated, but the basic principle is simple: these birds, quite simply, are very good at paying attention to one another and adjusting accordingly. Maybe we should all be a little more bird-brained, and get better at emulating our fine feathered friends.