Books: Flights of Winged Majesty – Review of ‘The Unfeathered Bird’

Katrina Van Grouw

DETAILS The drawings in Katrina Van Grouw's "The Unfeathered Bird" were all based on real specimens. Here, a common coot.

In the acknowledgments to her unsettling and irresistible book, "The Unfeathered Bird," Katrina van Grouw pauses in her listing of names to say, "I must assure readers that no birds were harmed during the making of this book."

It seems an odd disclaimer for a collection of bird drawings, until you look at the drawings. The birds in this book are not merely unfeathered, they are also skinned, skeletal and sometimes — to serve the presentation of a skull or a wing, a tongue or a trachea — disassembled.

Then they are drawn and described in the text, with great skill and attention to the details — of their structure, their evolution and their lives — and with a slightly wicked sense of humor that appears often enough to lift the book beyond another compendium of bird life.

A certain amount of mischief is inherent in the plan of the book. The birds, sometimes muscled, sometimes only skeletons, all drawn from real specimens that either died accidentally or were already preserved in collections, are posed as they might have been in life — flying, standing, walking.

The resulting drawings, detailed and monochromatic, will please those with a taste for the mildly grotesque. I particularly loved the red-and-green macaw and budgerigar that appear on facing pages. The macaw is drawn with most of its skin removed, but it retains its musculature, scaly feet, and piercing eyes that stare directly at you as it perches on one leg, holding a pencil to its beak with its other foot. The stare seems to demand a response, but I had no idea what to say.

The budgerigar is just bones, a skeleton on a bird cage perch staring at its reflection in a toy mirror. The reflection captures every detail of the bird's curiously tilted beak and skull, including the paradoxically empty eye sockets.

I could not take my own eyes off it.

I also spent more than a little time admiring the puffy, fruit-like toes of the great-crested grebe, and gawking at what the author/artist describes as the "extraordinarily coiled windpipe" of the trumpet manucode.

This is a coffee-table book, and compelling images are enough to sell such a volume, but "The Unfeathered Bird" delivers on the other promise of such books, not always fulfilled, that there should be something to read.

The text doesn't compete with the wit of the drawings, but serves in the necessary position of supporting actor. Wherever you stop to read you are rewarded with nicely turned and erudite discussions of how and why each bird is built the way it is.

A good example is the kink in the heron's neck, compellingly drawn and well-explained, as "the result of a single elongated vertebra that attaches to its neighbors at a right angle instead of end to end." Why? "The kink forms a sort of hinge mechanism, enabling the bird to lunge forward with lightning speed and astonishing precision."

There are also the necessary tidbits to be read aloud to companions around the coffee table when you tire of saying, "Hey, look at that trachea!" I learned, for instance, that parrots, like human beings, are right or left "handed," (yes, their hand is, in human terms, a foot.) Unlike human beings, however, "the overwhelming majority are left 'handed.' "

I don't think you need to love birds to fall for this book. In fact, if you are too devoted to the surface beauty of the things with feathers, it may feel a bit rude in the way it undresses and exposes their structure and evolutionary history.

But if you love the natural world for its astonishments, for something as obvious but thrilling as the huge variety of shapes that birds and their parts have evolved, then "The Unfeathered Bird" won't disappoint. Just consider the darting spear of the green woodpecker's tongue and the grooves in the bird's skull to accommodate it. Call me a sucker for weird skull grooves, but I can't imagine how anyone would not delight in that strange bit of anatomy.

Ms. van Grouw thanks those who tolerated her "unsavory activities" — the defeathering, skinning and disassembling of birds that made her drawings and the book possible — and so should readers, for the entirely savory result.

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