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Male & Female Palawan Peacock-Pheasants (Polyplectron napoleonis) Photo by René Lausberg
Just in time for the holidays, here is a colorful fancy fowl to enjoy! The Palawan peacock-pheasant (Polyplectron napoleonis) lives in the humid rainforests of the Palawan islands, a small chain of islands which are part of the Philippines and which are located in the Sulu Sea (to the southwest of Manila and just north of Malaysia). If you count their splendid tails, male Palawan peacock-pheasants grow to be a half a meter (18 inches) long. Females are much smaller and plainer. The pheasants voraciously hunt the many invertebrates which live in the jungle and they live on a varied diet of insects, myriapods, mollusks, spiders, and isopods as well as smaller vertebrates such as frogs, lizards and baby snakes. They also eat some berries and seeds.
Male Palawan Peacock-Pheasants (Polyplectron napoleonis)
In a world of beautiful birds, the male Palawan peacock-pheasant stands out because of his black plumage, his svelte eye mask, his erectile crest, and above all because of the large iridescent green-blue ocelli on his magnificent tail (which he can fan above himself in the manner of a peacock). From an earlier post, you will recall that ocelli are ornamental “eyes” made of feathers. The birds are monogamous—which is to say they form tightly bonded pairs which look after the nest together.
Male Palawan Peacock-Pheasants (Polyplectron napoleonis)
Sadly, peacock-pheasants are tropical birds which do not take well to aviaries and bird farms. The species is listed as “vulnerable” because of the swift deforestation of the Philippine jungles and because of overcollecting of the magnificent feathers, however the Palawan peacock-pheasant does not seem to be very likely to go extinct soon—which is splendid news for bird-lovers and aesthetes!
Male Palawan Peacock-Pheasants (Polyplectron napoleonis)
Aquamarine Gemstone
One of my favorite precious stones in terms of pure beauty is the aquamarine. Like emerald, morganite, and heliodor, aquamarine is a type of beryl (beryllium aluminium cyclosilicate). Aquamarine gemstones are blue or bluish green. The name is Latin for “water of the sea” and there is a beautiful pale blue-green color which is also called aquamarine.
Aquamarine Tiara belonging to Queen Elizabeth II
I was hoping to find a beautiful crown crafted out of aquamarine gemstones and it turns out that the Queen of England and the United Kingdom happens to have a lovely tiara made of Brazilian aquamarines (she has lots of nice things). It was commissioned from the jeweler Garrard in 1957 and apparently includes several aquamarines which the people of Brazil gave her as gifts (they never give me anything, but maybe I am not being patient enough). Queen Elizabeth II seems very fond of her lovely pale blue tiara and there are several photos of her wearing it.
The color aquamarine
The Common Teal
The Common Teal (Anas crecca) is a gregarious dabbling duck which is widespread throughout temperate Europe during all seasons. Further east, great flocks of teals live in Siberia during the summer and then migrate to India and China for the colder months. But why is this duck being mentioned on Ferrebeekeeper? Well, as it turns out, this is a post about color–and the common teal gives its name to one of the most widespread colors, teal, a middle tone blue-green. The male common teal has a blue-green patch of feathers around his eyes–and these feathers are what the color was named after.
Situated half-way between blue and green, teal is a handsome tone which appeals to people who like both those colors. Teal featured prominently in the Plochere Color System, a color methodology favored by interior designers since the late forties. Additionally, teal was one of 16 original HTML web colors formulated in 1987, so if you are a web pioneer or came of age in the nineties you may also have seen quite a lot of it. But, even if you are somehow not an aging interior designer or an old school computer geek, you have still been inundated with the color teal by a different industry.
In order to make scenes comprehensible, television and movie producers (and visual artists for that matter) need to make the people in their shots stand out from the background. Most actors range in hue from pale to dark orange. As you can see in the color wheel which I have very helpfully included above, orange is opposite on the color wheel from teal. The easiest way to make actors contrast with the background and thereby have shots with adequate color contrast is to portray orange actors against a teal background. Of course gifted directors use a whole range of techniques to provide contrast to their shots—talented filmmakers utilize light and shadow, wide-ranging color contrast, and subtle visual cues to make shots comprehensible. But terrible directors (or producers running behind schedule) can simply have the digital effects technicians make everybody look like John Boehner running around in a swimming pool. It’s shocking how many movies (especially bad movies) do in fact look exactly like that.
Chevy Chase, is that you? You look like a pumpkin!
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