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Sluice (2009) by Kate MccGwireBits of bones and pigeon feathers may be garbage to you and me, but not to artist Kate MccGwire. The London-based artist used thousands of discarded pigeon feathers to create amazing works of art. In this interview with Kate, Don't Panic Magazine asks: why pigeon feathers?I am currently using pigeon feathers as they come from a bird that is generally reviled.
The bags all emptied out, we're heading around the perimeter of the lake, a path that will take us past a small tunnel made of branches and twigs that they can just barely crawl through, across a bridge (see the keystone?), along the lower level of the tiered paths that wind around the small mountain to a beautify city lookout at the top, past the Japanese pagoda and the waterfall, around the boathouse (which no longer sells ice cream treats), and back to the car.
They run ahead, footsteps kicking up dry dirt and rock as they move along the path, pausing now and again to peer at a treasure on the ground, a shiny rock ('a crystal'), a perfect stick, a dandelion, a squirrel jumping away with a foraged scrap, a Steller's jay that has jumped from the ground to a branch above with a loud squawk.
They run ahead as I take photos from behind, of them, of branches, of light on the water.
Lowering my camera, I focus in on what has now captured one's attention.
'Don't pick that up!'
It's a feather.
He pauses and looks up at me, his fingers inches from the feather.
'Don't pick that up. They can carry disease.'
Back in the Day
I remember when feathers could be picked up, when feathers were magical and marvelous, when you could run your finger along the edge of a feather and be amazed by the softness. I remember the impossible discovery of a peacock feather.
Many years have intervened between then and now. Many years, two children, and a host of frightening flus that have lingered in public—and parental—consciousness. The residue of those years and those flus has accumulated into a frothy, sticky, mostly unfounded, squeamish sign of my age, one that comes oozing over the sides of the admonishment: 'Don't pick that up. It's dirty!'
Needless to say, while we have small collections of rocks, broken shells, shark's teeth, and other treasure we've accumulated through various walks and expeditions, there are no feather collections in our house. Not even one.
What Is That Game Where You Collect Pigeon Feathers Made
All of that came rushing home when I saw a photo by Robert Clark highlighting a feature essay by Thor Hanson in Audubon Magazine. The photo is an 'almost' grid of forty-seven feathers, brightly colored, samples of bird plumage from species of birds I've no doubt never seen. These are not your ordinary, everyday pigeon feathers, the ones I am most tempted to disallow my kids pick up and handle. These are feathers that remind us of the beauty and wonder of birds, the exotic free-flying nature of birds, and the sheer diversity of birds. But this is a reminder from a new angle. Feathers.
The photo is a stunning visual entrée into an equally captivating essay underscoring the beauty, novelty, and incomparable nature of features. No matter what your relationship with birds, or whether or not you would or would not have picked up (or let your children pick up) a feather on the street yesterday, Hanson's high-flying essay on feathers may sweep you away. Hanson's essay weaves together the scientific and the aesthetic, the personal and the historic, the pragmatic and the mystical, and emerges as a beautiful and inspiring exposé on feathers, a distinguishing feature of birds, one that is unique to birds, one at which you may not have stopped before to marvel or think about too deeply. After reading this essay, I think you will. I think you'll pick up a favorite blanket or winter vest and think differently about the realities of feathers. You might even look up a photo of a golden-crowned kinglet so that you can have an image to pair with Hanson's story of a night spent in sub-zero weather—and the realities of the small golden-crowned kinglet sleeping somewhere in the open air, relying on its feathers alone for warmth.
What Is That Game Where You Collect Pigeon Feathers Step By Step
Making Connections
'On any given day, up to four hundred billion individual birds may be found flying, soaring, swimming, hopping, or otherwise flitting above the earth. That's more than 50 birds for every human being, 800 birds per dog, and at least a half-million birds for every living elephant. It's about four times the number of McDonald's hamburgers that have ever been sold. Like the robin, each of those birds maintains an intricate coat of feathers—roughly one thousand on a ruby-throated hummingbird to more than twenty-five thousand for a tundra swan. Lined up end on end, the feathers of the world would stretch past the moon and past the sun to some more distant celestial body.' ~ Thor Hanson
Hanson's essay is thought-provoking and eye-opening, and for students with an interest in birds, or even an interest in paleontology, there is plenty of potential for inspiring and inspired science projects that may find a launching point in an essay on feathers. One path students might follow involves considering the question: where did feathers come from? And why do birds, alone, have them? A project looking at the history of feather formation will take students back to the age of dinosaurs. That's right, scientists now label birds as a living form of dinosaur, a fact students can investigate further in the 'BLAST into the Past to Identify T. Rex's Closest Living Relative' genomics Project Idea.
A Shift in Perspective
After reading 'The Multiple Miracles of Bird Feathers,' I found myself wondering about the weight of 'don't touch that' fear I've somehow picked up along the way, part of the baggage of socially-induced paranoia that many parents carry around, especially when and if we are too busy to stop, question, and get the facts. If faced with the kinds of delicate, diverse, exotic, breathtaking, and mesmerizing feathers shown in the Clark's photo, I doubt I could insist we leave the feather where it lay. That's why we carry anti-bacterial hand gel, right? But can I let go of my concern about the ordinary feathers we're more likely to discover in our regular outdoor excursions? After all, while there is a wonderful plethora of natural terrain in and around the Bay Area, we're still in a city. Hawks perch on the streetlights in front of my house and nest in the trees out back, but there are also thousands upon thousands of pigeons and starlings and blackbirds, even in the parking lots of the grocery stores.
Questioning my own concern, I talked with our Lead Staff Scientist, someone who has gotten used to the fact that I approach many of my science stories from a non-scientific starting point. I didn't simply ask are feathers safe. Instead, I asked, how feasible is it for students to do a project in which they investigate either the kinds of bacteria that might linger on bird feathers collected in a local area or what approach one might take to best ensure the safety of bird feathers if one wanted to collect them. (Before I asked, I did a quick search engine search and read just enough to know that, most likely, the parental baggage I was carrying around was unjustified, far-fetched, and should be shelved—in favor of a rekindling of the magic, beauty, and scientifically-amazing properties of feathers.)
Our lead staff scientist confirmed that while it's 'possible' to get a disease from bird feathers, the probability is very slim. Still, there is a question that can be asked, and so there are projects that can be designed and procedures that can be put in place to explore how 'safe' found feathers might be. Is a parent who says, 'Don't touch!' right—or just over-protective?
Putting Feathers to the Test
There are three kinds of health hazards that can be carried on a feather: parasites, bacteria, and viruses. Of the three classes of possible health problems one might trace back to feathers, culturing bacteria from feathers and analyzing the bacteria colonies that grow is the most likely course of investigation for student research. Students interested in developing an experimental procedure that could be used for a microbiology-based study of feathers might find the procedure used in the Germ Invasion Project Idea a helpful starting point. Is exposure to UV light a helpful strategy?
Safety Considerations and Guidelines
Because there are many rules, regulations, and safety guidelines that have to be followed for student science investigations that deal with microorganisms, devising an independent course of study examining microorganisms and feathers requires careful attention to safety guidelines, awareness of any local fair rules, as well as ISEF regulations, and may require the supervision of a teacher or mentor or access to a specific kind of lab. In addition, your project may require pre-approval from fair officials.
For more information about safety considerations when working with bacteria, and about related ISEF rules and regulations, visit the Microorganisms Safety Guide and the Projects Involving Potentially Hazardous Biological Agents resource.
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It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s… a bit of both. Meet PigeonBot, a biohybrid, flying robot that combines the propeller, fuselage, and tail of a man-made aircraft with the wing structure and actual feathers of a pigeon.
Designed by engineers at Stanford University, PigeonBot made its debut in a paper published on Thursday in Science Robotics. The bot can’t flap, but the mechanical skeleton has a few of the same joints as a bird’s wings. Bird wings are more complex, sharing a lot of anatomical features with human arms. For example, bird wings have features that resemble a human wrist and finger-like digit. PigeonBot has a wrist and finger, too, decked out with 40 feathers—20 per wing—gathered from domestic pigeons called squab, reports Rob Verger for Popular Science.
What Is That Game Where You Collect Pigeon Feathers Called
'Most aerospace engineers would say this is not going to work well, but it turned out to be incredibly robust,' lead author David Lentink tells NPR’s Merrit Kennedy.
What Is That Game Where You Collect Pigeon Feathers Come
By programming the robot to bend at one joint, the researchers could see precisely how that movement contributes to a bird’s aeronautical maneuvers. While in the past, researchers wondered if each feather might be controlled by its own muscle, PigeonBot showed that adjusting the wrist or finger caused its feathers to fall into place.
“The problem is, of course, I don’t really know how to train a bird to just move its finger—and I actually am very good in bird training,” Lentink tells Maria Temming at Science News. “You can make manipulations in a robot wing that you could never do or want to do in a bird.”
The flying machine needed birdlike maintenance at times. If its feathers are ruffled, they need to be preened, or smoothed into place by hand, Lentink tells Popular Science. And the feathers work best together if they’re all sourced from the same bird.
What Is That Game Where You Collect Pigeon Feathers Come
What Is That Game Where You Collect Pigeon Feathers Found
The researchers flew the robot in a wind tunnel to see how the wings held together in different conditions. In turbulent winds, properly aligned feathers will hold themselves together with what Lentink calls “directional Velcro,” microscopic hooks that prevent the wing feathers from getting blown apart.
Lentink and his team worked with Smithsonian vertebrate zoologist Teresa Feo, who created nanometer-level 3-D reconstructions of the hooks and captured electron microscopy images to map their locations on different feathers for a separate paper published today in Science. By using PigeonBot, the researchers showed that the hooks were necessary for stable flight. When the feathers were rotated so the hooks couldn’t line up, they couldn’t hold together in strong gusts, and the bot became unstable. Like Velcro, the mechanism in feathers makes a noticeable sound, and it’s absent on silent fliers like barn owls.
'The work is very impressive,' Alireza Ramezani, an Northeastern University engineer who led a team that built a bat-inspired robot in 2017, tells NPR.
Tyson Hendrick, a biomechanist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who was not involved in the study, tells Science News that Lentink’s PigeonBot the best set of robotic wings for testing birds’ wing feathers for flight, but “there’s plenty of room for improvement.” Hendrick notes the robot’s limited joints, and suggests that the effect of a shoulder joint to raise and lower the wings would be an interesting path for future research.
Ramezani sees the biology-inspired bot’s success as a path toward new drone designs and experimental aircraft, per NPR. Soft, feather-inspired designs would be safer to fly around people than the hard propellers of rotary drones. And Lentink suggests that the Velcro-like mechanism might be useful in high-tech clothing or specialized bandages. But feathered aircraft are probably not on the horizon.