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the world as a magical place of color and movement. Peeking over the nest’s edge, maturing with each passing day, she spots a human watching. She stares back.
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iologist Geoff Hill spends a lot of time watching birds—always has. As a kid in Ohio, his mother, an English teacher, would smile as he trudged outside toting his binoculars, birding guide and notebook, fully focused on exploring the world as children will do. On rainy days, he’d mine his 64-pack of Crayola crayons, carefully discerning the difference between various shades of green, among them pine, forest, fern and mountain meadow. So no one was surprised when he made a career out of studying birds: In hindsight, even his specialty—bird coloration—wasn’t much of a shock. But Hill himself never guessed that his discoveries about bird ornamentation would end up making him one of the world’s foremost authorities on the topic. Until this spring, Hill’s four books and nearly 200 published articles—on such mysteries as why bluebirds are blue and males tend to be more visually brilliant than females—remained fodder for like-minded academicians and scientists. Which he thought was a shame. So, two years ago, with the dogged determination of a true zealot, he began looking for a way to proselytize on pigmentation to a lay audience, preaching the gospel of color and how it affects the complex life of a creature as seemingly ordinary as a house finch. The resulting book, Bird Coloration, published by the National Geographic Society in March, offers ordinary mortals a richly nuanced window on the avian world.
Baby girl finch is two weeks old now and almost the size of her parents. Her first growth of feathers has formed, although, like a kid’s cowlick, telltale bits of fluff betray her youth. Gray-brown and richly patterned, she blends with the branches. This isn’t the time to stand out from the crowd.
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For the past few days she’s been moving about the nest, flexing her wings, peering longingly at the ground. Temptation. Fear. Finally, she hops to the nest’s edge. Urged on by her parents, she hops shakily into the abyss, frantically flaps her wings and—yes!—she’s aloft, at least for a moment, landing awkwardly on the ground. So far, so good. Having worked up an appetite, she looks for mom, dad and food. In the quest for sustenance, humans are ignored. Later, she tests her wings again and finds a high branch upon which to perch. She chirps to the others in her flock. But now she sees that one human being—that guy—again. He’s still watching, along with others like him, younger maybe. She stares at them, wary and unsure.
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tudents who work with Geoff Hill find house finches, while predictable and, yes, a tad mundane, much less frustrating than, say, the yellow-rumped warbler, which in reality may or may not have a yellow rump. The latter are an identification nightmare: Some have black stripes, while others appear brown and dull depending on season, age and diet. “By the end of the first field trip or two, (students) all loathe yellow-rumped warblers,” Hill writes in his book. “Sometimes they suspect I’m fooling them when I keep using the same species name for birds that look so different.” It’s the point of the lesson, though, this fact: The color of birds is more than feather-deep. Plumage color tells scientists and experienced bird watchers a lot about a bird’s gender and even its position on the avian Opposite: Biologist social ladder. Hill wrote Hill has a par- Geoffrey academic tomes on ticular soft spot for bird coloration before house finches, and authoring a book on the for lay readers. he’s researched their topic His other books include coloring and habits A Red Bird in a Brown more extensively Bag, which details the plumage particulars than any other spe- of the house finch, and cies. “They’re easy Ivorybill Hunters: Search Proof in a Flooded to spot, and they go for Wilderness, a fun read about their lives about his ongoing openly, ignoring search for the world’s the humans around rarest bird.