birds
October 2008 
Beauty on the Wing
Posted on Aug 15th, 2008
by 
T
T
I've always wondered why birds are that beautiful, and why birds sing so dang purty.
Well, there's only one possible explanation- birds are simply pleased by such things. They have genuine artistic mojo. There's no reproductive value in the nuances, the little touches, the subtleties of the design and coloring of, say, a cedar waxwing. Science would merely say that this is 'nothing but' the mechanism employed by a female Waxwing picking the best genetically endowed partner. But, if I want to get laid and I impress you with my Picasso Woodblock Prints- instead of my TiVo of a survival-of-the-fittest Olympic relay- it says something big about higher aesthetics and refinement- favors that birds are not supposed to curry.
So, Dear Reader, I leave you today high in the trees with a bit of a quote, pondering the charming society and artistry of birds:
If ... we look at the speculum on a duck's wing, we might imagine that an artist had drawn his brush across some ten blank feathers, which overlap sideways - making white, bluey-green, and black lines - so that the stroke of the brush touched only the exposed part of each feather. The pattern is a single whole, superimposed on the individual feathers, so that the design on each, seen by itself, no longer appears symmetrical. We realize the astonishing nature of such a combined pattern only when we consider that it develops inside several or many feather sheaths completely separated from one another; and that in each individual feather it appears at an early stage while it is still tightly rolled up, the join pattern not being produced until these feathers are unfolded. What sort of unknown forces direct the construction work in the 'painting' of these feather germs? (Portmann 1967, p. 22).
Well, there's only one possible explanation- birds are simply pleased by such things. They have genuine artistic mojo. There's no reproductive value in the nuances, the little touches, the subtleties of the design and coloring of, say, a cedar waxwing. Science would merely say that this is 'nothing but' the mechanism employed by a female Waxwing picking the best genetically endowed partner. But, if I want to get laid and I impress you with my Picasso Woodblock Prints- instead of my TiVo of a survival-of-the-fittest Olympic relay- it says something big about higher aesthetics and refinement- favors that birds are not supposed to curry.
So, Dear Reader, I leave you today high in the trees with a bit of a quote, pondering the charming society and artistry of birds:
If ... we look at the speculum on a duck's wing, we might imagine that an artist had drawn his brush across some ten blank feathers, which overlap sideways - making white, bluey-green, and black lines - so that the stroke of the brush touched only the exposed part of each feather. The pattern is a single whole, superimposed on the individual feathers, so that the design on each, seen by itself, no longer appears symmetrical. We realize the astonishing nature of such a combined pattern only when we consider that it develops inside several or many feather sheaths completely separated from one another; and that in each individual feather it appears at an early stage while it is still tightly rolled up, the join pattern not being produced until these feathers are unfolded. What sort of unknown forces direct the construction work in the 'painting' of these feather germs? (Portmann 1967, p. 22).
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