Category: Curiosities of Nature

The Layers of “The Unfeathered Bird”

The Unfeathered Bird by Katrina van Grouw

My copy of Katrina van Grouw‘s The Unfeathered Bird demanded to be placed on my coffee table. In the same way that everything about a cheetah says fast, everything about The Unfeathered Bird says coffee table book. There are 385 illustrations of 200 bird species. It is 287 pages long and weighs a couple of kilograms. When a book like that asks space on your coffee table, you ask “how much space?”. Fortunately, I have a sturdy coffee table.

I also have two small children (hence the sturdy coffee table). As a result, my first encounter with the content between the covers was not the orderly perusal with wine I had been planning for that night. Instead, it started with my 4-year-old, The Frogger, opening The Unfeathered Bird and asking, while staring at an immaculate illustration of a skinned bird foot, “Daddy, what is this book about?”

“It’s a book about birds. It shows you the insides of birds so we can learn how they work.” Continue reading “The Layers of “The Unfeathered Bird””

The Art of “The Unfeathered Bird”

Skeleton of a Great Hornbill by Katrina von Grouw - The Unfeathered Bird (2012 Princeton University Press - Used with Permission)
Skeleton of a Great Hornbill by Katrina von Grouw – The Unfeathered Bird (2012 Princeton University Press – Used with Permission)

Katrina van Grouw’s The Unfeathered Bird is curious hybrid – not a textbook, not quite an art book. Forget definitions, it is a rich and beautiful work with many rewards for readers.

I approached this book as a visual artist and a decidedly non-expert reader, and I will admit an initial bias against it. I love color. I was convinced that a coffee-table book of birds drawn without their feathers was like a book on ice cream that featured only the cones.

I was wrong. Continue reading “The Art of “The Unfeathered Bird””

The Birds of “The Unfeathered Bird”

Rebecca earned her master’s degree with a focus in avian ecology at Binghamton University, worked at Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology, has conducted international research on birds overseas, and completed her PhD in avian physiology the University of Memphis. She now teaches biology at the South Carolina Governor’s School for Science & Math.

After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in esthetics, plasticity, and form. The greatest scientists are always artists as well. – Albert Einstein

Birdsketch by Rebecca Heiss (All Rights Reserved)I became a biologist for a reason. It was not that I was particularly good at the sciences, but that I was terrible at art. My stick figures were never going to pay the rent. Perhaps lacking the drive to master any one trade, I’ve dabbled, becoming proficient in a smattering of largely scientific endeavors. It is little wonder then, that Katrina van Grouw’s mastery of multiple fields makes me feel a twinge of jealousy. Continue reading “The Birds of “The Unfeathered Bird””

Meet the Olm: Salamander Super-Ager


The olm is the only species in the genus Proteus within the Proteidae family (the other genus is Necturus). Olms are cave salamanders found in Southern Europe. Like many other derived groups of salamanders the males courts the females before depositing a spermatophore for her to pick up with her cloaca. Fertilization is internal in the olm. Continue reading “Meet the Olm: Salamander Super-Ager”

Sunday Science Poem: Big Dumb Objects, Arthur C. Clake, John Keats, and the Sublime

RamaThe purpose of the Big Dumb Object in science fiction is to cure us of our familiarity with the universe. We tend to forget that the universe is complex, vast, exotic, eerie, and downright mystifying. Our daily experiences with its odd phenomena constitute what is normal, and normal is, of course, that which we’re inclined to take for granted. Among the bizarre things we accept as normal are the spontaneous development of a child into an adult, our ability to perceive coherent images and sounds that reach us through a tangled mess of reflecting waves, that there “are mountains in Chile, and not a hill in La Plata,” and the fortunate fact that Jupiter hasn’t yet sent the Earth spinning out of the Solar System.

Big Dumb Objects are metaphors that regenerate the strangeness of the universe in order remind us that a strange universe is a necessary condition for the sublime experience of scientific discovery. Two writers who knew this well were Arthur C. Clarke and John Keats. Continue reading “Sunday Science Poem: Big Dumb Objects, Arthur C. Clake, John Keats, and the Sublime”