I’m incapable of passing up a feather. If I chance upon a feather lying on the ground, I feel compelled to sweep it up and examine the colors and patterns, and then drag it like a soft file against my wrist. Feathers are invariably pretty. The standards iridescent. The structures impeccable, sometimes otherworldly.
Interestingly, a feather grows the
opposite manner to a tree. A tree grows new at the top, while a feather grows
new at the bottom. Trees add height and reach through their tips, where buds at
the ends of branches and the crown extend upward into the light. Feathers, by
contrast, push out from follicles in the skin, with fresh cells forming at the
base and older material carried upward until the feather unfurls to full
length. One reaches higher by stretching at its topmost points, the other by
building steadily from its root.
Yesterday, I found a feather near my
back door—a northern flicker feather, by my best estimation. That’s a
woodpecker, for those of you from my lovely smelterite-filled neighborhood in
East Helena, Montana.
Northern flickers are strikingly
attired and sure to catch your eye. They also overwinter in our rumpled swath
of Montana. For that, I give them due credit. At the same time, they can prove
a pest. They are not opposed to pecking away at the exterior of a house if they
appreciate the sound it makes or suspect dinner is someplace inside. A few
years ago, one of our local flickers took to hanging out with a rowdy band of
magpies that regularly descended upon my yard.
Interesting stuff, that. And the
feather I picked up is interesting enough that I placed it on a shelf in my
den.
—Mitchell Hegman
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