Feathers are one of Mother Nature’s truly great ideas. I love them all: big, small, colorful, or drab. Light, strong, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.

Recently a yellow bird left me a single feather on my deck, as a gift.

It is hard to photograph a feather and give it proper treatment; too easy to make it look like a specimen from a text book.

So I hung around with the feather for a week and found that the two sides are quite different in texture and color.

And it responds to light in all sorts of interesting ways.

So I photographed it from both sides, holding it close to a lamp.

I don’t know the exact species of bird that gave it to me, but I think its name contains the word yellow.