~ Anne Kilgannon, with Thanks to whomever offered this book for the taking at our monthly Chapter meeting.
Settle in for an exhaustive—but not exhausting—wide ranging, deep diving quest to study, yes, feathers. Now, I think feathers are often beautiful and intriguing, even artful objects, that I obsessively pick up when I find one under my birdfeeder, especially the orange-shafted, brown-spotted cream-colored ones shed by the visiting flickers. I admire them but until I read Thor Hanson’s inquiry into the subject, I hadn’t really examined them either scientifically or otherwise. Luckily, Thor* has cheerfully and persistently looked at feathers with all the who/what/where/when and especially how-and-why of these impressive wonders with the energy and wit of an eager crime novelist.
*I call him Thor not because I’ve met him and am a friend, but because I feel he would brush away any formalities in the first five minutes if ever we should meet. And this is the second book of his I’ve been drawn to review, the first several years ago, Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid, published in 2021, concerning the “Biology of Climate Change.” Feathers was published more than a decade before, in 2011, so perhaps this is also a study in the evolution of his thinking, with at least seven “missing links” of his other intriguing publications. Let’s see what stories and insights he has amassed on this topic.
Any bird book that begins with vultures instead of goldfinches or Golden eagles is going to be a serious venture into looking at things we often look away from. As a biologist Thor moves in closer and doesn’t hesitate to turn over any bodies he finds. He admits to stashing dead birds, bugs and other lucky discoveries in the family freezer for further study. Everything in the teeming living and once-living world is a subject to be probed and every subject is part of a giant puzzle in time and place to be connected, whether prey, predator, ancestor or newly hatched descendent. So, it makes perfect sense to begin with dinosaurs.
Actually, it is likely that we need to look into the world before dinosaurs to discover whether birds and dinosaurs had a common ancestor. And grapple with the issue of whether scales became feathers or not, whether feathers were just eye-catching decorations, and, most crucially, how flight might have been either a ground-up or branch-down discovery. Thor really digs into the “why” of feathers as well as how they may have evolved, in fact, these questions are intertwined. Other creatures fly—bats and many insects, for instance—without feathers, and as feathers require a fair amount of bodily effort to produce and protect—all that preening, molting and replacing, they must also proffer worthwhile advantages for birds. His discussion of the likely evolutionary path that led to the great variety of feather endowed birds of today is fascinating, challenging, and full of the quirky side-bars biologists examine before they arrive at any satisfying theories, let alone conclusions. The work is always open-ended and illuminated by curiosity and discoveries that upend previous constructions, in this case of new fossils and better techniques and tools giving rise to new theories. Thor invites his readers to explore the many branches of thought and join in pondering the possibilities of the evolutionary process, still in progress.
Feathers seem to be here to stay. They keep birds warm. They allow birds access to sources of food and shelter, escape from predators, and success as predators themselves. Anyone watching a hawk stoop after prey or a diving bird streak through ocean depths or even a bushtit flutter around a birdfeeder will realize the variety and genius of feathers. Bird courtship greatly depends on the flair of color, shape, size and display of feathers. Soft down plucked from parent birds’ own breasts shelter newly hatched baby birds. The exact pattern of feather colors, size and other arrangements makes a bird a duck or a pigeon or a hummingbird. Feathers make the bird even as birds make the feathers. Thor guides us through the vast possibilities, finding the commonalities as well as the adaptations that link robins and sparrows with ostriches and swans.
And then he turns the story around to us, how we humans have used, abused, and become enchanted with feathers. Every world culture, it seems, has found meaning in feathers. We make headdresses that add mystic powers to leaders and shamans; we adorn hats and clothing with feathers to steal beauty and allure for ourselves; we use feathers as tools to create art and sacred works that elevate the human experience. We imagine flying, winging ourselves into the skies and the thrill of sailing on air as the birds do.
Birds have always fascinated us. Thor, unabashedly. He raises so many questions and suggests so many ways of thinking about bird evolution and all the places our lives and ambitions have been entangled with bird life in this book. Issues and questions I, for one, had not thought to explore but now am charmed and inspired to do so. The evolution of so many wonderous beings, the study of life in all its variety, is a quest for knowledge and understanding that leads to reverence and awe. That chickadee has so much to tell us.
