Parrots, frogs and colour-changing feathers

Welcome back to this series of Animal Highlights, where we are taking inspiration from animals in museums. This week we are thinking about how objects in museums can also be considered “multi-specied assemblages”. Multi-species ethnography is as approach that has fairly recently been developed in fields like anthropology. When applied specifically to museum collections, a multi-species approach allows us to think about objects not just as cultural artefacts, but as material representations of complex interactions between different species.

In this episode, we explore an object that I think represents a hugely fascinating ecological network that involves people, parrots, plants, fish and frogs. The object uses a particular technique of Indigenous aviculture that produces an amazing effect in parrot feathers, and we explore the implications of this process for thinking about ethical relationality between species and what it means for birds to be included in kinship networks.

Object Focus - A Mundurucu Headdress

Headdress collected by William John Burchell (1886.1.908), Pitt Rivers Museum. Image: Pitt Rivers Museum

This week our object comes once again from the Pitt RIvers Museum in Oxford. It is a Brazilian feather headdress made sometime in the 19^th century. It comes from an Indigenous community from the Rio Tapajos region of NW Brazil, called the Mundurucu.

There is so much to say about the Mundurucu as a community and the history of their material culture with regard to colonial processes and European collectors in Brazil. However, because this is an animal highlight we are mostly going to focus on the animals linked to the headdress. (See the bottom of this post for some extra links to more information on the Mundurucu).

The shape of the Mundurucu headdress is more of a “feather cap,”  shaped almost like a swimming cap you might wear at a pool. Instead of rubber, the cap is made from an intricately woven palm fibre and cotton, and it is adorned with vibrant, yellowy-orange parrot feathers. On the back of the cap, facing down towards the neck and shoulders of the wearer, are long blue macaw tail feathers, contrasted in sections with inky-black curassow feathers, a large turkey like bird found across Amazonia

Changing feather colour through tapirage

One of the most incredible parts of the headdress are the bright yellow feathers on the top. Unlike the rest of the feathers in the headdress, the amazing yellow-orange hues are not ones that are usually naturally produced by the parrots they were harvested from. Instead, before they were plucked from the living bird, their colour was intentionally changed through a remarkable process called tapirage.

Tapirage feathers on a Brazilian headdress. Image: Rosa Dyer

The word tapirage was certainly a new word to me when I first came across it. In simplest terms, tapirage refers to when the colour of a bird’s feather is intentionally changed through human intervention, through a process of plucking and regrowing feathers on live birds. The results of this process are that the feathers which were previously green or blue, regrow in distinctive yellow and orange hues, which are then plucked again and used as materials for the making of cultural objects like this headdress. This practice has been exclusively reported on birds in the Psittacidae or parrot family, and in particular macaws and Amazon parrots. It requires the capture and keeping of the bird, as the process can be long and involved.

Green feathers from Amazon parrot species can be turned yellow or orange

It is thought that the reason for this colour change is in part due to a disruption in the mechanism of how pigments are deposited in the feathers, particularly melanin pigment. Melanin is responsible for the presence of darker colours, like black and browns, so when these pigments fail to be deposited, the colours not determined by melanin (ie the bright yellows and oranges) become the main colour of the feather, therefore turning what would be green or blue feathers into yellow or orange ones. It is possible that the traumatising of the feather follicles through plucking, plus potentially other interventions, can cause this disruption of melanin deposition. 

There aren't may lab-based studies of tapirage, nor is there a lot of evidence of it still being practiced today by communities, so a lot of what we know about it comes from historical accounts. The famous naturalist Alfred Wallace (who first described evolution via natural selection with Darwin), gives a description of tapirage in his account of his travels in the Amazon in 1853, which is from around a similar period to when the headdress in the museum was likely made.

“The feathers are entirely from the shoulders of the great red macaw, but they are not those that the bird naturally possesses, for these Indians have a curious art by which they change the coIours of the feathers of many birds. They pluck out those they wish to paint, and in the fresh wound inoculate with the milky secretion from the skin of a small frog or toad. When the feathers grow again they are of a brilliant yellow or orange colour, without any mixture of blue or green, as in the natural state of the bird. The feathers are renewed but slowly, and it requires a great number of them to make a coronet, so we see the reason why the owner esteems it so highly, and only in the greatest necessity will part with it.” - Alfred Wallace, A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro(1853:324)

Frog Secretions

Wallace's mention of frogs introduces another animal element to the assemblage which may have prodcued the yellow feathers in the headdress, and is an equally fascinating part of the tapirage story.

Dart frog secretions may have been used as part of the tapirage process

There are many mentions of frogs being used in historical accounts, and some say that the frogs would be collected and then pierced with thorns in order to make them secrete the desired substance that would then be used to rub on the plucked follicles of the parrots. Interestingly, evidence seems to suggest that the frogs used for this were probably dart frogs, as in the frogs used to poison arrows! The Latin name of one species of dart frog actually gives us a clue to this linkage. In 1757, Cuvier described a small, brightly coloured yellow and blue frog found in the Guianas and Northern Brazil as Dendrobates tinctorius. The second part “tinctorius” is a direct reference to its use in the tapirage process, tinctoria being a latinised version of tapirer, meaning to dye or change colour. I love when the scientific names of species can offer us ethnobiological clues like this, I think it really serves as a reminder of the indebtedness and inter-relatedness of Linnean taxonomy to much often much older Indigenous knowledge and practices.

Ethical relationalities of tapirage

If we focus in on the animal aspects of the tapirage process, I think there are a ton of questions that come up, that aren't addressed in historical accounts:

Did the frogs survive this treatment of being pricked with thorns? What was the effect on them forcibly being made to secrete these substances'? And then on the other hand, beyond the supposed result of producing these yellow feathers, what were the effects of this interaction on the parrots themselves? Did they suffer any effects from being in contact with potentially toxic substances from the frog bodies? Some dart frog secretions are known to have psychoactive effects – did the parrots experience anything like this? We don’t have the answer to any of these questions unfortunately, and no lab-based studies have been done to determine what, if any, the effect the frog secretion might have on feather colour. 

Beyond frogs, other descriptions of tapirage state that instead, or sometimes in addition to, the topical application of frog secretions, once the feathers had been plucked the parrots would also be fed particular substances which were believed to enhance the reddish-orange colour of the regrown feathers. This included the flesh of a red river fish called the pirara or the bright red seeds of the annatto plant, Bixa orellana, which is often also used to create bright red body paint. Other accounts mention a variety of other animal-derived substances being fed to the parrots, from the fats of turtles or river dolphins, various animal eggs and other plant sources. What we get from these early descriptions is a picture of a process that not only included the plucking and regrowing the feathers of a captured parrot, but also could include a pretty complex interaction of different substances from a variety of rainforest species. 

Bixa orellana or annatto may have been fed to parrots Image: Leonardo Ré- Jorge

Due to the lack of lab-based studies on live birds, the jury is still somewhat out on factors actually contribute to the creation of tapirage feathers. 

One of the reasons that there aren’t many studies of this practice in lab-based conditions obviously comes down to an animal rights issue – it is very difficult to justify undertaking experiments which lead to the stress and suffering of parrots (particularly if you are going to expose them to potentially toxic frog secretions), when the outcome of this research doesn’t really have any argument for being beneficial to the birds themselves. 

tapirage therefore remains one example of a practice that remains fairly obscure in the eyes of Western science, but which at the same time represents a long lineage of Indigenous scientific practice, based on similar principles of observation and experimentation. I think it shows that science is not just something practiced by people in lab coats! It seems obvious that Indigenous communities did develop techniques that fairly reliably produced tapirage feathers, and that this was the result of long and involved relationships with parrots and other species. 

Parrots as Kin

I think this question of bodily entanglement between species is at the heart of understanding tapirage, and implies some important things about the relationship between the parrots and people.

The process of producing tapirage feathers is not a quick one! It involves an extended intimate entanglement with a bird, one which arguably far exceeds that of the interaction involved in the hunting and killing of an animal, another common way that feathers are sourced. Overplucking of feathers will easily kill a bird, and if you kill the bird, the feathers you want won’t grow, so the process of procuring tapirage feathers requires entering into an extended relationship of care. 

Parrots are frequently noted as being kept as pets within communities in the Amazon, but many anthropologists note that the relationship between the community members and parrots goes beyond that of pets, and more closely aligns to that of kin. Just as tapirage involves a process of transformation in terms of colour, we also see this as a key theme in how parrots are moved from their lives as wild animals and transformed into members of the community. Parrots are extracted from their nests as young chicks and then raised by people in the village, they are part of the family and treated as such, sometimes even hand fed from the mouths of women as if they were babies.   

I’m really interested in this seemingly dualistic position that the parrots used for tapirage might have been in, where they are seen as both kin but also as sources of materials. On the one hand, the tapirage process requires an extended relationship of care to be established between the parrot and the people wanting to acquire their feathers, it is not a process that can be undertaken on wild birds, as the processes of plucking, feeding, topically applying substances, regrowing and replucking feathers in one which requires continued and repeated bodily engagement between people and birds. It involves the parrots being transformed from wild animals “out there” in the forest, to recognised kin in the community. At the same time however, as we mentioned before the process of tapirage is one which in many ways probably involves a level of stress or suffering on the part of the parrots, to be forcibly removed from their nests, have your feather follicles traumatised through repeated plucking, be force fed various foods that may not be part of your natural diet and then also be rubbed with poisonous frog juice can’t be a hugely fun experience! This isn’t even to mention the multiple other animals involved in the process, like the frogs, fish or turtles, who don’t enter into the kinship sphere, but nonetheless become bodily entangled in this process.

Perhaps this is what Van Dooren ( 2014) calls “violent-care”? He voices violent-care in the context of killing or inflicting suffering on individuals, for the greater good of the species e.g. killing a bird to study it, which may then help the conservation of future generations. I’m going to talk about this idea in a future episode in relation to museum specimens, but I think it is also interestingly applied here in terms of “kinning” birds for feather harvesting. 

Caring practices do not always negate the presence of violent or harmful affective relations. Some researchers who work with Indigenous communities in the Amazon say that this is part of the expected contract of community membership – there is an understanding that in return for being made part of the community, protected and cared for, you as a member must also give something to contribute to the continuation and care of that community. For the parrots, this contribution is a bodily one. I don’t know if this can really explain away the experience of suffering that might have defined a parrot’s experience, but I think it is an interesting way to think about parrots as kin, one that is neither a solely positive or negative interaction.