Anyway, any time you have poop, you have a record of what an animal ate, and the scientists used this one to look at bugs and pesticides over several decades of the 20th century.

One of my editor’s complaints about the story was how much I used the word “chimney.” I see what he’s talking about. The first paragraph of this blog post uses the word six times, four of them in one sentence. The problem is, there aren’t any good synonyms. He tried “smokestack,” but I think you can really only use that for a chimney on a factory, right?

Photo: Bruce Di Labio

The day after I interviewed the scientist at Yale for my blue feathers story, I sat in on a lab for the ornithology class he teaches. It was the day they were doing feathers, so there were tons of bird skins out on the benches and feathers to look at under the microscope and so on. This didn’t make it into the story at all, but wow, it was cool to look at all the different feathers. Birds are amazing.

Here’s how you fit a flamingo into a museum drawer.

Those birds all get their yellows, reds, and oranges from carotenoid pigments. You may have heard of carotenoids–they’re one of those things you’re supposed to eat. In the body, they’re converted into retinol, a form of vitamin A.

This bowerbird has a very splashy bit of hot pink at the back of his neck.

There are about 20 species of bowerbirds. They’re native to Australia and New Zealand, and they have this crazy mating thing: Males build a little stage, or bower, to show off their awesomeness to females. Look, I can’t do this justice. Go watch this David Attenborough video about bowerbirds. You won’t be sorry.

These birds use a combination of pigments and structural colors. Remember, green is yellow (pigment) plus blue (structural).

This bird may not look like much in the visible spectrum, but in UV–which birds can see–it is a super exciting bright color.

So there you go. More birds. If you missed the story I was reporting, read about blue feathers.

And, for a bonus, here are some ducks I saw poking around the Tidal Basin. My guess is canvasbacks, but I’m not very good at ducks. Anyone know any better than me?

Duck update, Monday 3/5: I believe the consensus of my Facebook commenters is Lesser Scaup. The head is more scaup-shaped and the bill is lighter than a canvasback.

As often happens in my line of work, I collected a bazillion times more material than I could ever possibly use in the story. This was even more true than usual because the final story is about half the length it was originally assigned at. (Nothing to do with me–there have been big changes at Smithsonian recently.)

Here’s what’s going on with bird colors. They get yellow and red and orange from their food. You can buy color supplements to feed to pet canaries, and zoos have to make sure flamingos get the right food to keep their cheerful color.

But that doesn’t work for blue, because birds (and mammals) digest the pigments that make blue in plants. It turns out blue is a structural color. It doesn’t come from a pigment; the birds actually build it into their feathers. The proteins in their feathers are arranged so, when light bounces off of them, the red wavelengths cancel each other out and the blue gets amplified, so your eye sees blue.This works for all different shades of blue and even ultraviolet. Green, as you might guess, is yellow plus blue–a yellow pigment and a blue structural color.

Rick Prum, the scientist, spent a lot of time with me, explaining his research and then walking around the storage area at the natural history museum, pulling out drawers of skins and talking about different birds.

This paradise tanager from South America uses a whole patchwork of strategies to color itself.

You’ve got the splash of red, a pigment from something the bird ate. The black comes from the protein melanin, which the bird makes itself. The blue is a structural color and the green is the structural color plus a pigment from food.

Just look at this cuteness!

These are two species of manakin, a kind of bird that lives in the American tropics. Look at their exciting blue caps. Their slightly different shades of blue come from the way the proteins came together as the feathers grew.

Final note: I wrote several other blog posts along the way which I can now tell you were related to this story. I saw two museums while I was in New Haven, the Yale University Gallery and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. And I came across this charming explanation of a synchrotron while I was trying to make sure I knew how they work.

The study found that snow leopards eat mostly ungulates, which was no surprise. But the researchers also found the remains of one solitary chukar partridge. If you would like to live like that adventurous bird-eating snow leopard, here’s a University of California extension document on raising chukar partridges. Like snow leopards, chukar partridges are native to Eurasia, but unlike snow leopards, they have been introduced to the western U.S.

Illustration: ”The Cat: An introduction to the study of backboned animals” by St. George Mivart, 1881

This may be unreasonable of me, since standing in a long line with a lot of excited children seems like it might be central to the NHM Experience. Now, to be fair, I was at the Natural History Museum during the August school holidays. And I also must point out that this museum, like all the museums I wanted to see in London, has free admission to most of the exhibits. That is pretty great. But I’d already had the line experience once, with about a 20-minute wait to get into the museum in the first place, so I decided to stick to the free parts of the museum.

The Natural History Museum has an astounding, late-19th-century building. It looks like this on the outside:

and like this on the inside:

That is the one and only dinosaur that was free to view. It’s a Diplodocus. Actually a cast of a Diplodocus, donated by Andrew Carnegie, who owned the original. (Read about it here.) The original is at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.

My favorite object in the museum was this. Take a look. What do you think it is?

Looks kind of tree-like? Kind of pretty? Colorful? And a little bit spiky? And…like a Victorian chamber of horrors?

Yes, the case contains hundreds of hummingbirds mounted on branches among bits of lichen and nests. The label says they don’t know exactly where it came from, but this was the sort of thing Victorians went in for. It’s a way of thinking about nature where you appreciate it as things of beauty to be brought indoors and admired, not something you leave in its place for other people to enjoy. That’s a modern way of thinking, I suppose, and it’s probably a modern thing to feel sorry for the hummingbirds. I don’t really feel sorry for the hummingbirds as individuals. They would have died a long time ago anyway. But it’s a shame that they died just to be pretty in someone’s house.

I also enjoyed this intersection of earth and human life, from the earth sciences hall:

That’s a chunk of flint on the left and a paleolithic flint hand-axe on the right. This seems so delightfully English to me. Flint forms in chalk – and you know southern England has chalk, right? The white cliffs of Dover? Right. That’s chalk. The Cretaceous period gets its name from that layer of chalk. (The Latin word is “creta.”) And I like that they pair the chunk of flint with a real-life axe made more than 100,000 years ago. I know it’s the stereotype, that Americans go to Europe and are amazed at how old everything is, but, look. Everything there is OLD. It is really different. And totally cool.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

An aviary, if you’re not familiar with the term, is like a zoo for birds. The National Aviary has about 150 species of birds. There was also the occasional mammal – I spotted a mouse in one cage (ok, that was not part of the display) and a sloth in another (pretty sure that was intentional), but otherwise, it’s all birds. A few are in individual cages. The bald eagle and Steller’s sea eagle each gets its own spot, open to the sky. Most are grouped together in larger habitats, like a tropical rainforest and a grassland.

One of our first stops was feeding time at the lorikeet cage. Lorikeets are noisy little parrots that like nectar. At feeding time, you can buy a little cup for $3. Or you can let someone else do it and take pictures of them:

One of my favorite birds was this one, which wanders around the rainforest room. Shortly before I took this picture, it flew up to a branch where a bunch of ibises were making an awful racket, sidled up to them, and made this pose:

It worked – they shut up and flew away. But the most remarkable thing about this bird is that it’s a Victoria crowned pigeon, native to New Guinea. The pigeons most of us know the best are filthy-looking birds that walk around in cities, but really the pigeons and doves make up quite a lovely and diverse group. There are hundreds of species. Many have beautiful colors. This one has crazy head-feathers and is the size of a chicken. It’s not the pigeons’ fault someone domesticated them and let them take over the world’s cities. And I must admit, I like the city ones, too. They’re funny.

The wetlands display included quite a few flamingos:

Fun fact: Flamingos get their color from their diet. In the wild, they eat pink food and extract it that way, but in captivity, they’re normally fed some kind of color supplement.

I found the whole aviary experience delightful. We were there on a weekday, which meant it was overrun with tiny children, which was part of the fun. Near the penguin exhibit, my walking was temporarily impeded by a girl, about three, who was having, really, the only appropriate reaction to this stuff: pulling on her father’s hand, pointing, and screaming, “DADDY! DUCK! DUCK! DUCK!” (You can see the ducks and the penguins on the aviary’s Penguin Cam.)

We particularly enjoyed the bird show “Wings!” It cost $5 extra, and it was so worth it. For about 20 minutes, we learned about birds and habitat conservation and – ok, mostly, birds flew around and it was so cool. The macaws showed off their climbing skills. A whole bunch of vultures flew right over my head, raising quite a wind. There were live people talking, but also a video that introduced the show and each bird’s habitat. Birds flew in either from over a wall or from cages up near the ceiling that were wired to open at certain times.

The show was fun, partly because birds are awesome and it’s impressive to see them up close, and partly because it had a toe firmly over the line that divides tasteful from cheesy. The last bird, a bald eagle, came out to “God Bless the U.S.A.” I think it actually struck a dramatic pose on the line “I’m proud to be an American.” At the end of its segment, it showed off its wings in front of a fireworks display on the screen.

Actually, even better than that was what happened after the show. They brought out a very disheveled-looking parrot with a special skill. This picture is terrible, but I have to share:

Her special skill is accepting dollar bills and putting them in the donation box. Don’t worry, I think the dishevelment is from molting, not disease. (I hope so, anyway.) She looked so pleased with herself. I was able to resist on this visit, but the next time I go, I’m taking a stack of one-dollar bills.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

The book, Unlikely Friendships: 47 Remarkable Stories from the Animal Kingdom, is about animals that are buddies. There’s a monkey that befriends a kitten, a hippo that follows a tortoise around, a snake that hangs out with a hamster – all sorts of good stuff. Sure, it’s not investigative journalism, but who doesn’t want to read about a monkey that adopts a kitten?

Jenny’s a beautiful writer, and I can’t wait to read the book myself – I just added one more sale to those Amazon stats.

Here’s a nice item about the book in today’s issue of Parade.

I’d always heard that dodos went extinct because they were tasty and were a nice change from Dutch ship food; in other words, that sailors ate them all. Actually, one of my sources told me, it was probably the introduced mammals that did them in. They would’ve competed with pigs for food, and both rats and pigs probably ate their eggs.

Anyway, read the story. I discovered in the course of doing it that someone had already worked out almost two decades ago that the fat pictures of dodos were probably wrong, and I thoroughly enjoyed talking with that guy about his study and the new work. Next time I’m in Edinburgh, his museum is definitely on the list.

art: Dutch School, 17th century

Another 110,000 chicks and 2,000 adults died when the tsunami hit the Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge, but it’s nice that these two survived.

Of course, tsunamis are a thoroughly natural threat for the Laysan albatross. If you’re going to insist on nesting on low-lying Pacific islands, this kind of thing is just going to happen every now and then. The Save the Albatross campaign describes some of the less natural threats, like longlining – a fishing technique where a boat puts out a line of hooks, from one to 50 miles long; the birds try to grab the bait and are hooked and drowned. (You can solve this by weighting the lines.) They’re also prone to eating floating bits of plastic, which isn’t particularly healthy.

UPDATE, later on 3/24: Here’s a super sweet picture of Wisdom and her chick taken on Monday by Jim Gilbert, who dropped by here and left it in the comments of another post.

Photo Credit: Pete Leary/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service