Compared with whether it can fly or not, whether it is covered with feathers can allow us to accurately determine whether a creature is a bird or not.
What is a feather? It is said to be "the product of keratinization of the epidermis of birds". But for non-researchers, such an explanation may only make it complicated and difficult to understand. After all, anyone who has ever seen a wild bird or a bird, or played with a feather duster or badminton, knows that it is a feather, a natural object that only birds possess and is difficult to imitate or make.
This article is from the Beijing News Book Review Weekly's August 27 feature "Bird Watching: Hidden Wisdom and Corners".
Hagoromo, almost perfect creation
Feathers are a miracle in natural evolution. Since no other suitable word can be found to describe it, it is necessary to borrow the subtitle of Thor Hansen's monograph Feathers: A Miracle in Natural Evolution.
Feathers: A Miracle in Natural Evolution, by Thor Hansen, translators: Min Zhao and Qi Feng, Edition: The Commercial Press, January 2017
As a member of the human race, where most of the body's surface hair has deteriorated and is useless (of course, the hair is best still thick) and instead covers and decorates the body with a variety of fabrics, I try to imagine the feeling of the birds draped in feathers growing from their skin, which is a little difficult, and it seems to have a strange itch.
What is certain is that we don't have such a perfect outfit as the hagoromo. We have to wear as light and cool as possible in the summer; wear a thick coat in the winter — the lightest and warmest, thanks to the stuffed poultry down feathers; when it rains, we need an umbrella or raincoat to help remove the rain; and we hope to be able to dress up delicately and decently when we go out on a date. To do all this, we need wardrobes for the four seasons, and we need to keep an eye on schedules and weather forecasts every day to keep an eye on changing trends so we can make appropriate dressing choices.
But the birds' feather coat naturally has all of the above functions.
A bird the size of a sparrow has about two or three thousand feathers on its body, while a swan can have tens of thousands of feathers on its body. According to the form and position of growth, the feathers on a bird have positive feathers covering the surface of the body (which are also divided into flying feathers growing on the wings, tail feathers at the tail, and contour feathers around the body), down feathers that are densely grown under the positive feathers, semi-down feathers between the main feathers and down feathers, fiber feathers scattered between the main feathers and down feathers that play a tactile function, and so on. They vary in length and length, but each piece has an extremely delicate structure, and when they are combined, they form a perfect synergy.
First, feathers are so light and light that they often become synonymous with lightness. "How much is a feather" is a difficult question to answer, but a sparrow with only about 3,000 feathers, including the skeleton and body, generally does not weigh more than 40 grams.
More critically, while being so lightweight, the feathers have extremely reliable warmth and waterproof properties.
In the cold winter of Heilongjiang, you can still see the northern long-tailed flying among the branches of the trees where the leaves have fallen, its small snowball-like round body, two circles smaller than the sparrow; in the winter, the lake surface of Beijing Park, which has begun to freeze, the green-headed ducks are still wandering freely on the smaller and smaller water. How do they stay cold?
Once the down jacket is wet, it loses its warmth, but the duck can move freely up and down the water and never worry about getting wet. The Emperor Penguins of Antarctica may be a better example – they can withstand the extreme cold in the Antarctic Circle and swim fast in the icy waters. Why?
There may be many reasons for this, but feathers have done a great job. Bird feathers are the best materials for thermal insulation and warmth discovered by humans so far, and they have an unusually precise gas-enclosed microstructure that can form a temperature barrier through fluffy feathers. And the outer layer of feathers — based on some still inconclusive principle of waterproofing — always keeps the inner layer dry.
Anchovy green bites the cuckoo
In the flight ability of birds, the feathers on the wings and tail also play an important role. Perhaps, contrary to imagination, the single flight feathers of birds are usually asymmetrical, which is the aerodynamics of feathers. Each feather has its own form and position, stacked in a specific order into complete wings, when the bird decides to take off, ascend, control, hover, dive... They can use and control these feathers precisely to form the required raw and control surfaces.
Over the course of hundreds of millions of years of evolution, feathers and birds have adapted to each other, allowing birds to enjoy the broadest living space for vertebrates on Earth — from thousands or even tens of thousands of meters in height, to all water surfaces such as oceans, lakes, swamps, and woods and grasslands on land.
Think about it: what would it be like if people could also wear a feather jacket that could be freely controlled and could help us fly, keep warm, and waterproof? The picture depicted by Yu Minguo in the Classic of Mountains and Seas is inevitably a little rough, leaving too much room for imagination; and if only a pair of feathered wings are grown, it is an angel in Western religious paintings. In fact, if the full function of the feather is taken into account, it may be more like the superhero in the movie who obtains his own unique rare armor, and wears it to the sky and into the sea and travels through the world.
The beautiful feathers said: Choose me!
Birds— in other words, bird feathers, have an extremely rich variety of colors and postures. Compared to humans with only a few skin tones and hair colors, those bright blue, emerald green, crimson, bright yellow, shimmering pearlescent or metallic luster, with flecked lines or charming gradients, are like a feast prepared by nature for human vision.
Great Red Stork
The vast majority of those with these brilliant feathers are male birds. In the social life of the birds, the male and female birds play different roles, and the male birds will use all their strength to attract the attention of the female birds during the breeding season, hoping that the female birds will recognize their charm. The female, on the other hand, has more choices and more responsibility for child rearing, usually dressing up and wearing more low-key, plain feathers throughout the year.
When the male peacock slowly opens his long tail covert into a screen, it is almost equivalent to turning himself into a dazzling landscape; the paradise bird in the Malay Islands that once haunted the British naturalist Alfred Wallace, each with exceptionally gorgeous and even fantastic feathers, will also dance a complex courtship dance on a carefully prepared field; the male Mandarin duck, which can often be seen on the lake surface of the park in recent spring, the upright yellow sail feathers and the color scheme of the hun body and the eyeshadow plate are also enough to show off.
New Guinea Bird of Paradise
Why do these male birds look so glorious? From the perspective of survival, this is obviously not a rational strategy. Too flaunted feathers can easily attract the attention of predators, including humans.
This question once haunted Darwin for a long time, and in 1860 he famously complained in a letter to his American friends: "Whenever I see the tail screen of a male peacock, I feel bad!" Because, such an excessively "flashy" existence is like refuting the evolutionary view of natural selection of "survival of the fittest.".
A few years later, Darwin published The Origin of Man and Sexual Choice. The central point he makes in the book is that, in addition to natural selection, sexual selection is also a major driving force for biological evolution and variation. Some traits that appear "not very important" are most likely acquired through sexual selection.
The common explanation is that females screen males with healthier physique and better genes by judging their appearance. But even so, the feathers of some male birds are exaggerated.
Richard Plum, a professor at Yale University in the United States, tried to reproduce and advance this somewhat "dangerous" insight in the book "The Evolution of Beauty": some birds are beautiful, complex feathers and courtship performances, purely for aesthetic reasons, for "female aesthetic tastes".
The Evolution of Beauty: The Forgotten Darwinian Theory of Spouse Choice, How It Shaped the Animal World and Us, by Richard M. Thompson O. Plum, Translator: Ren Ye, Reviewer: Liu Yang, Version: Nautilus | CITIC Publishing Group January 2019
In his view, the adaptive evolution driven by natural selection and the aesthetic evolution driven by mate selection are very different, the possibilities of adaptive evolution are convergent and relatively limited, and the openness of aesthetic evolution is much stronger and more unfettered. "Tens of thousands of species of birds around the world have evolved a unique aesthetic preference for decorative organs to complete mate selection, resulting in an almost immeasurable diversity of biological beauty on Earth."
Does beauty have to be possessed?
Birds, especially the beautiful feathers of some male birds, not only attract the opposite sex, but also constantly arouse human desires. And people are often not satisfied with viewing, but also want to possess it.
When human beings can't make all kinds of paints and ornaments at will, how precious the brilliant colors that feathers can provide are, and it is much easier to survive than the same beautiful plant flowers and insect bodies. On different continents and in different societies, feathers have naturally become a source of decorations loved by human beings.
The trade in beautiful feathers has therefore lasted for at least a thousand years. In the 19th century, when colonialism was at its peak and globalization was on the rise, birds that inhabited the globe began to face unprecedented challenges.
With the colonial era, explorers from Britain and other places traveled to almost every land on the earth, and with curiosity about the world and thirst for knowledge, they visited rare birds and plants, made specimens or brought them back to their own countries. Naturalists' knowledge of birds has increased rapidly, and their records and studies, their naturalistic paintings left behind by tracing specimens, are still classic documents that cannot be avoided today. But the gunfire behind it also left a cruel mark. It's a not-without-disputed question: Is it legitimate to kill birds for the sake of knowledge or art?
The effects of the forces of fashion on birds were much more generally severe than the harvest of a small number of explorers. In the Victorian era, hats embellished with feathers and even complete bird skins dominated the British and American women's hat market.
According to Birds in the Bush: A Social History of Bird Watching, Britain imported 20,000 tonnes of ornamental feathers from millions of birds between 1870 and 1920, and the trade was estimated at around £20 million – equivalent to £4 billion today.
Birds in the Bush: A Social History of Bird Watching, by Stephen Moss, translators: Liu Tiantian and Wang Ying, Edition: Peking University Press, January 2019
Frank Chapman, an American bird enthusiast, counted 700 women in hats on a summer afternoon walking in an out-of-town business district and found three-quarters of them with feathers on them. He identified the feathers from a wide variety of birds, including the traveling owl, the scarlet donna finch, the orange-breasted forest warbler, the cedar peacebird, the thorny song finch, the crowned blue jay, the scissor-tailed king tyrant, the red-headed woodpecker, the palm ghost owl, and the pine finch. Behind the fashionable ornaments is the bloody hunting and trade of birds.
The forces of opposition began to emerge, and also came from women. In February 1889, a group of middle-class British ladies got together and decided to make it their goal to oppose the widespread use of feathers in the women's hat trade. The association they founded, which attracted more than 20,000 members in its first decade and more than a million members today more than 130 years later, is the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), by far the most influential wildlife conservation organisation in Europe.
Under the efforts of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and other social organizations and bird lovers, after continuous publicity, controversy and legislation, feather hats have gradually withdrawn from the fashion stage, and the awareness of wild bird protection in other fields has also been continuously enhanced. Wild birds around the world are now protected by laws and conventions and are no longer the subject of mass hunting and buying.
But there are still people who cannot control themselves in the face of the temptation of beautiful Toba, even at the cost of breaking the law.
Kirk Wallace Johnson, author of "Meet the Bird of Paradise," tracked down a bizarre case over a period of 5 years: a 20-year-old Young American who studied music sneaked into the British Trin Natural History Museum one night in 2009 with pliers, glass knives and a trolley case, stealing 299 bird specimens collected by naturalists from the forests of South America and Asia, including 37 King Birds of Paradise and 24 Birds of Paradise collected by Alfred Wallace in the Malay Islands. 12 gorgeous birds of paradise, 4 blue birds of paradise and 17 flaming birds of paradise.
The young man had no interest in birds, and the reason he stole these classic specimens was his obsession with the fake bait of "fly fishing" tied with feathers. This instrumental craft, originally used for fishing, has become an independent niche art in more than a hundred years of tradition, and its highest source of material is the feathers of rare birds. A "George Scott salmon fly" tied in the Victorian way can use the feathers of up to 12 different bird species. While the bird trade has been tightly regulated, few feathers have survived legally, and prices are rising in the hidden markets of fly lovers. The infatuation and the temptation of profit together led a talented young man to become a feather thief – and was arrested after he sold some of his feathers.
The art of using wild bird feathers, a Chinese handicraft has a longer history - Diancui. The bright blue feathers of the kingfisher are inlaid on the metal base, which becomes a beautiful point of the crested phoenix crown, the tungsten flower, the phoenix... Behind this jewelry, which has been loved by the court nobles of all generations, is the innocence of the kingfisher. In order to ensure the flexible color of the feathers, the feathers of the dots need to be taken alive, and the chances of survival of the kingfisher after losing the feathers are slim. Kingfishers are small in size, and only a few feathers can be used for kingfishers, and a gorgeous kingfisher crown can require hundreds of kingfishers.
The hair ornament on Ruyi's head in the poster of "Ruyi Chuan" is Diancui. However, because the kingfisher is a national protected animal, today's dotcui technology no longer uses kingfisher feathers, but instead uses goose feathers dyed blue, or uses the process of "burning blue".
In recent years, whenever someone publicly publishes content that uses real kingfisher feathers to make dots, it will cause widespread opposition. - More and more people agree that the inheritance of craftsmanship can use alternative materials, and should not let a large number of kingfishers pay for their lives unnecessarily.
The most beautiful appearance of feathers should be on the bird's body, flying with it, migrating, or dancing against the bird in its heart, isn't it?
Written by | Li Yan
Editor| Luo Dong, Li Yang
Proofreading | Xue Jingning