(Science Week, day 1!)

I was walking uphill on a sidewalk, and it floated down and landed right in front of me. Such coincidences are rare but expectable, and this may have been my first chance to examine one so pristinely shed and fresh from the bird. It wasn't harvested or bought, and the owner – I'm guessing a crow – didn't want it anymore. You could almost have called it a donation.

It was too beautiful not to examine as I walked, with every hair-like, cascading barb still perfectly in place. Black vanes, and about eight inches long from quill to tip. It felt profound to look at it so closely, with its two complementary vanes, one so thin and the other so protrusive or bombastic by comparison not unlike a pair of human lips on its side.

But what made me stop and think I should save it for Science Week was the feeling of swooshing it around. I don't know what I was expecting. Perhaps just the feeling of waving a thin stick. But birds fly, after all, and as land mammals, our repeated amazement at this still seems slightly lacking. Presumably we accept it as unremarkable because we see it happening every day, and have even replicated it in hang gliders and aeroplanes. But even to somebody so amazed as to think birds were magical, I think their flight would immediately gain a sense of plausibility at their first opportunity to swoosh this feather around.

With a single paintbrush-like stroke through the air came a surprising amount of resistance, as though, even with my strength, it insisted on moving in the direction it wanted. To feel that, it was clear the use of this thing was to operate as a honed counterpoint to stationary air, existing to shoulder it aside. And that was just one feather. For a bird lighter than my arm, with an entire covering of them, the orientation of each tuned as the feathers themselves, it seemed implausible to imagine it not soaring and weaving through the air as it wished. It seemed fundamentally like swimming, propelling oneself by pushing against water.

That's what happened that day, and the feather sits here beside me in memory of the experience.

The first day of Science Week is Darwin Day, so I try to reserve it for something about life on Earth. This post seems especially appropriate, because it isn't just about birds, but about my unexpected chance to investigate life, not just on the Internet or even in print books, but up close, in person, seeing and feeling it for myself. It feels like a taste of where Darwin's legacy would have began amid the Galápagos and other famous stops, and what a continuing legacy of naturalists and biologists constantly do, and in whose terms they think and hypothesize. "Research" is more available than ever, and it's wonderful, but for a person outside that world of occupation, at least one direct taste of "where research actually comes from" seems essential.