Birds of a Feather
I collect things. Shells. Beach glass. Rocks. I don’t do anything with these collections, just scatter a few here and there throughout the studio and the house. Before I had a laptop my computer desk looked like a cross between a natural history museum and Disney does Burger King. Kid meal monsters shared valuable space with geodes and sand dollars. Feathers stuck out of the pen cup. A realistic toy aligator was glued to the printer.
All my kids had to do was give me a rock, make up a story about it and I’m tellin’ you, that was Christmas for me.
I posted a photo on FaceBook the other day. Turkeys. Wrote a whole post here but FB is where all the comments were. The comments eventually touched on feathers and that got me thinking about this whole collection thing.
Because I collect feathers. I’ve got at least one basket of them in the studio. Mostly white goose feathers I gathered along the lake where we used to live. After we moved to the foothills the feathers changed.
And so did the display. Most of these are from the wild turkeys. Maybe all of them, I dunno. Don’t come with name tags. They’re just there, on the ground.
I took this photo sometime during the winter. It was just….there, in the snow. Sticking up like you see it here. I don’t have a clue what bird this is from or what happened to him. Maybe the tracks leading from the upper left tell the tale. Anybody want to guess?
I collect bird nests too. Ones I find on the ground, usually in the fall after the residents have left and there’s nothing anchoring them down in the wind. At least that’s my theory. They’re abandoned and quite interesting but that’s another post entirely.
Anyone got some collections you want to share?
