Last week I went on an early-morning bird walk on the East ART (Applegate Ridge Trail). The light was soft and beautiful over the mountains and through the woods; the open hillsides were lushly green. We saw, or heard, many birds: gnatcatchers, vireos, grosbeaks, woodpeckers, a kestrel sailing over the hills, wren tits, warblers…I couldn't keep track of them all.
The most thrilling moment was to watch, even through my pitifully inadequate binoculars, several pairs of brilliantly blue birds flying from bush to bush in the dense buckbrush on the steep hillside, one pair chasing others out of their nesting site. Their brilliant blue heads flashed in the sun. They were lazuli buntings.
 |
| https://marinaudubon.org/jrbird/level-6/Lazuli-Bunting.php |
But they were not, as I had thought, "la-ZOO-lee" buntings, as in the rock—"LAP-is la-ZOO-lee," because the bird, I learned, is the "LAZ-oo-lee bunting." No one could tell me why. Later I learned from Partridge's etymological dictionary that the word comes from a Persian word meaning "a blue stone," so "lapis," meaning "stone," is tautological. The bird, then, must be named after the stone, for its similarly scintillating blue color. "Lapis," however, is "o.o.o.," in Partridge's terminology—of obscure origin—and there was no help in understanding pronunciation differences. Such are the mysteries of words. Isn't that beautiful?
Nor, I also learned, were the the lazuli buntings (did you pronounce it correctly?) blue. The shining, eye-catching, luminescent blue on the head of the birds as they flew from bush to bush was, I'm sorry to say, an illusion. Birds can't make blue feathers.
Not only did the bird experts on my walk tell me this, but so does Scott Sillett, a wildlife biologist at the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, who says, on the Smithsonian website, "No bird can make blue from pigments." Apparently, they can make red and yellow feathers but not blue ones. What I was experiencing when I saw that flash of brilliant blue on the lazuli bunting was "light waves interact[ing] with the feathers and their arrangement of protein molecules" to make me think I was seeing blue.
Wait. I was seeing blue. So was everyone else. "Look at that brilliant blue!" we exclaimed, binoculars at eye level.
I could almost accept that what I was seeing was a trick of light when I watched the bird fly, but it makes no sense whatsoever when I hold a single blue feather in my hand. I turn it over and over. I put it in shade and in sunlight, and it is still blue. I put it next to a red feather. This one is red. This one is blue. How can you tell me there is no such thing as a blue feather?
Such are the mysteries of nature.
And isn't that beautiful? "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious," Einstein tells us—in words, I say, as much as in birds.
