S6E3: Parrots and frogs - Multispecies Assemblages and the Changing of Feathers

Rosa traces a Munduruku feather cap from Brazil to the museum case and discuss how tapirage was a process used to turned green parrots  feathers a blazing yellow by using frog toxins, dyes and time. Beauty and pain sit side by side as we weigh Indigenous innovation, care and the cost to animals.

• Pitt Rivers Museum

Credits:

• Recorded: 9 November 2023 Claudia Hirtenfelder, executive producer, editor and co-host 
• Rosa Dyer, script writer, narrator and co-host
• Rebecca Shen, episode artwork and logo
• Gordon Clarke, bed music
• Other sound effects from BBC Sound Effects, Pixabay, Epidemic Sound
• Learn more about the team here. 

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Transcript

Siobhan O'Sullivan 0:01

This is another iROAR podcast.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 0:13

Welcome back to season six of the Animal Highlights, where we're focused on animals and museum collections slash objects. In today's episode, Rosa's gonna bring two animals into focus or two sets of animals. Parrots, because Rosa loves her birds, and frogs and the kind of relationships that are used between these parrots and frogs to bring about particular kinds of feathers. Hello, Rosa. Welcome back to the animal highlight. It's great to have you back on the show. So uh today we're not just speaking about one species, right?

Rosa Dyer 0:51

Yeah, hi Claudia. It's really nice to speak to you again. Uh yeah, so this one I've kind of I've stuck with birds because you know I love my birds, I love my feathers, but I kind of have expanded out to think about an object more as I'm gonna throw the word multi-species out, thinking not just about the bird feathers, but also about other animals that might be involved in the making of an object.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:11

And and of course, when we're saying an object, you're speaking about like an object in a museum, right?

Introducing The Munduruku Headdress

Rosa Dyer 1:15

So the kind of basis of this series, a lot of the um kind of way I've gone into it is to think about um objects that are particularly in mostly the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, because that's where my PhD is based. So the starting point for thinking about this episode is um one, I think my favorite head my favourite feather headdress that's in the Pitt Rivers collection. It's this beautiful piece that's on display. It's very different in shape, I'd say, from what you might think of a kind of a Native American feather headdress. It's more of a feather cap. So it looks almost like a swim cap, but rather than made of rubber, it has these beautiful bright yellow feathers on the top of it. And then down the back, there are these brilliant black feathers, and then kind of interspersed along the black feathers, there are these blue feathers. It's completely beautiful and always kind of stops me in my tracks whenever I see it. And it's made by it sounds huge. It's quite big. I mean, the top of it isn't massive because the feathers at the top are quite small. They're from they're from parrot breast feathers, but down the back you've got kind of the long tail feathers of a curacao, um, other black feathers. So it kind of come down to your mid-back, I think. So it is it is kind of making a statement with the colour and the kind of presence of it. It's made by this community called the Munduruku in Brazil. We're not really completely sure how it got to the Pitt Rivers Museum. It certainly got there sometime in the 19th century, but the kind of documentation is a little bit murky. I would say there's like so much to talk about with the Mundaruku as a community and you know their whole history and their kind of entanglement with European colonialism and how Munduruku objects got to European museums. I think if it's okay, you know, because we're in an animal highlights episode, I am going to slightly put that to one side and focus on the parrots. But maybe in the blog post I'll add some links if people are interested in kind of that side of the anthropological aspect of it.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 3:00

I mean, of course, the the human-animal connections here are really important and significant, but it is kind of interesting to focus on the animal artifact here and to think about how it comes to be. So yeah, I'm really excited to hear more.

Why The Yellow Feathers Stand Out

What Tapirage Is And How It Works

Rosa Dyer 3:12

Yeah, it's that's amazing. And I think, you know, it's impossible to disentangle people from this object because the process of making it is, you know, it's made by people and the relationships between the parrots and the people, I think, is something we'll really focus on. Yeah, it is slightly difficult to kind of give an audio description of it. I'd maybe encourage people to go to the blog and look at it, look at it, because I say it's absolutely amazing. Yeah, it's made of these kind of three sections of the top, which are these yellow feathers, the black and then the blue. Um, I'm going to focus on the yellow feathers though, because it was a process that I'd never really been that familiar with. But when I was looking into, you know, detail how these feathers were and what species they were from, I came across this process called tapirage, which I don't know if you'd ever heard of. Um yeah, I will say also just a kind of little footnote on pronunciation. I'm saying tapirage. I'm not completely confident that that is how you say it. I've heard people say tapurage, I've heard people say tapurage. I'm just going to go forward with confidence that it's tapurage, and I think like we're just going to have to. We forgive you. So, yeah, the thing that really struck me when I first saw the feather headdress was that the yellows on it are just like stunningly vibrant and bright and a kind of orange that when you see yellow parrot feathers from, example, like a blue and yellow macaw, they have a certain type of yellow to them, which is very different from these feathers. So I think like that's how I got down this whole line. It was actually just the visual kind of splendor of the object itself and what this yellow was. And so the actual like yellow-orange hue of the feathers aren't ones that are naturally occurring in parrot feathers. They're not ones that are naturally produced. Instead, what's happened is they've been produced really specifically by people by keeping parrots in a very particular way. Usually, when you're procuring feathers in a kind of Amazonian context, most of the time the parrots, all the birds are being killed. It's usually from you've hunted the bird, and then the feathers are kind of a byproduct of that hunting. But in this case, what's happened probably is that the parrots themselves have been captured probably as nestlings and then kind of domesticated and kept in the community for the purpose of producing these feathers. And that's because taparage is a really long process, it's not something that happens quickly. What it is is um the feather change itself has occurred, sorry, occurs through taking your parrot, which you've, you know, loved and kept in your community, presumably, and then plucking all of its feathers. Um and you have to be very careful when you do this, because if you overpluck a parrot, it will die. So you're plucking certain parts of the feathers, usually I think the breast feathers, and then you're doing certain things to it. So um we'll talk about this in more detail, but you're doing things like force-feeding the parrot or rubbing it with particular substances, and you're traumatizing the feather follicle itself. So when the feathers grow back, they're not growing back their original colour, which would have been probably blue or green, but they grow back this amazing yellow or orange. So what you're actually doing is kind of disrupting the way that pigment is deposited in the feathers as they grow and completely changing how they look. So it's this a whole amazing process. I don't know how the Mandaruki or any other of the Amazonian communities figured out how to do this, but it's not a quick process and it's one that really involves kind of a whole other aspect of domestication and caring and kind of long-term care for a bird in order to procure these what must have been really valuable feathers and kind of make sense that they'd be then put on this amazing feather headdress.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 6:32

It does sound quite painful though. I mean, you're saying caring and stuff, but it does sound like it's a process that would have been quite sore for the birds, right? I don't assume plucking feathers is a pleasant process for the birds.

Frogs, Plant Dyes, And Force-Feeding

Rosa Dyer 6:45

Completely. And I mean, to kind of bring in our other animals to us, when you talk about an animal assemblage, it wasn't just plucking feathers, but actually there was then a whole other aspect to it of uh dart frogs would be introduced, would be the kind of other animal involved in this. So we do have to kind of rely on quite a lot of historical information for this. I will just say I don't think there's much, if any, taparage going on today. And so I'm kind of getting a lot of this information from historical accounts from people like Alfred Wallace in the 19th century, who talked about um kind of encountering this as a historical as a process that he was seeing when he travelled in the Amazon. But anyway, so dark frogs, you'd not only pluck the feathers, but you'd then rub um dark frog poison onto the traumatized follicule, um, which was thought of as something that would then also help in changing the colour. Um, in addition to that, you'd force feed the birds. So you'd force-feed them something like anatto, so the Bixa orillana plant, which is where if you've kind of seen um South American body paint, the kind of bright red um comes from that pigment. It's also the colour of um red lester cheese comes from a natto, interestingly. Other animals as well, so there are accounts of them being forced fed, um parts of turtles, parts of river fish, parts of dolph uh river dolphins. So yeah, you're right, you know, these poor parrots are ending up in quite a kind of situation of being force-fed or covered in dark frog, essentially poison. And we think of dark frogs as, you know, a thing that you put on arrowtips in order to hunt and kill things. But actually, if you look at their Latin name, one species, dendrit dendrobates tinctorius, the tinctor there comes from um like tincture, which is to, you know, tinger and blue. So, and tapurage is the kind of French Guyanan word, which means the same thing. So there is actually this kind of legacy in the in the Latin naming of the dark frogs that is related to this process.

Ethics, Suffering, And Historical Sources

Claudia Hirtenfelder 8:34

Well, that's really interesting. I just want to make sure I understand. So you're saying, I mean, you're speaking now about a process that's a historical process uh that involved parrots and now other animals like frogs. And these parrots, as far as you can tell, were being kept uh for their feathers. Um, and periodically or at different intervals, their breast feathers were being plucked so that the follicule would be disrupted. And then while that kind of disruption is happening, different substances, such as the poison from a dart frog, would be rubbed onto there so that when the feather grows back, it would grow back a different colour. Um, and in addition to this, sometimes the animals were being force-fed different stuff again because it was believed that this would change the pigments of the feather.

Rosa Dyer 9:19

That's exactly right. So the I guess the kind of scientific aspect of it, and there haven't been a lot of scientific studies on taparages like is kind of understandable because I'm not sure you're really going to get ethical approval to do this to a parrot nowadays. Um and you shouldn't, I don't think. But yeah, so the way that to kind of give a tiny lesson on kind of feathers and how they grow, so they're like fingernails or hair, they're kind of non-living materials. So the only way that their colour is going to be determined is right at the beginning when they're being formed in the feather follicule. So the idea is that before the feather regrows, at that point of, you know, you've just plucked it and then the feather is kind of a tiny thing that's starting to regrow in the skin, that's the point at which you then apply dark frog secretions and then force feed them so that you're then supposedly influencing the colour. Um, and the way it works is so uh parrot pigment parrot feather pigmentation are different from a lot of other birds. They're determined by both melanin, so um, you know, our darker colours, so are blues and blacks and green and browns, but then also um cetacefulin, which is where parrots get their really bright, brilliant, you know, reds and greens and yellows. And what you're doing when you're traumatizing the feather follicule, they think, is you're stopping the melanin from being deposited. So a feather that would have been blue because you'd have had melatinin melanin influencing it, would only come out with the cetasopulvin pigmin, which would then be bright yellow or orange. But yeah, I must say, like the historical records are really interesting. But yeah, I had the exact same thought process of you, thinking, like, oh, like these poor parrots, like what's happening to them? And also what happened to the frogs? Like, are they surviving this process? Also, I kind of slightly went down the thought process of, you know, these frogs are like famously poisonous, or they're like famously quite like psychedelic, have a lot of the effects of um dark frog screen. So, like, what are these, like, what is actually the kind of yeah, physical effect on the parrots themselves? Are they actually surviving it? Because to me it seems quite like almost unbelievable.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 11:21

Or are they like tripping out as well?

Rosa Dyer 11:23

So they're they're they're going through Yeah, there's these parrots flying around having like bald parrots just having an absolutely mad time. We don't know.

How Feather Pigments Change

Claudia Hirtenfelder 11:31

When when are we talking about it? When when do you suspect? So, like how what is the date of this headdress? Like, when do you suspect this kind of practice was happening?

Rosa Dyer 11:39

So, I mean, this headdress is definitely 19th century or before. We don't know, we don't have a really kind of good documentation for it. The kind of accounts from um Alfred Wallace, for example, are coming from 1850-ish. Um, but then there's certainly, I can't remember off the top of my head when the um Dendrobates tinctorius is given the Latin name, but that's I think in this um 18th century sometime. So there's definitely quite a long history of this. I've had tried to kind of track down to see if there's much of this practice going on nowadays, and I haven't really managed to find anything much. Um an anthropologist, uh sorry, an or uh what's the word? Ornithologist? Ornithologist, yes, that's the exact word I'm looking for. An ornithologist friend, um, I have sent me a photo of who of um some Amazon parrots um with a community he'd work with in Brazil that had claimed to be taparage, but it was kind of a this is a friend of a friend's photo who says this, so it wasn't a kind of uh, I'd say really kind of strong source material there.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 12:39

Um And do you get the sense that this was a practice that was fairly widespread, or this was a specific only this specific community seemed to practice this with parrots, or do you get the sense that there were various communities across South America or Brazil that were engaging in this kind of like feather-dying practice?

Who Practised Tapirage And Where

Rosa Dyer 12:57

It's really difficult to say. I think from the breadth of feathers and feather work that I've seen through my research, um, they're not kind of singly attributed to one community necessarily. I think they're tend to be associated with um Brazil and with the kind of uh Munduruku and Tupi language groups which are in that kind of region of northwestern Brazil. Um, but we don't know. I think that's it, is that we're really reliant on a like existing objects like the one in the museum and also quite limited historical documentation, which as ever with a lot of kind of trying to trace animals through the archive, you often lose what the story of the animal is in favor of, you know, I was a really strong explorer who found, you know, these savages in the rainforest. And, you know, you get this really, you know, of a narrative that isn't necessarily helpful or, you know, that reliable to understand what the actual kind of human animal kind of assemblages and interactions were. And certainly for how um when I've been reading about it and then, you know, reading other case studies in a more kind of contemporary context for how parrots and people in the Amazon interact, I think what I kept coming back to is this relationship of care that you were talking about earlier, of thinking about, you know, is it a relationship of care if you're bringing these parrots into your community and looking after them for quite a long time? You know, the process of regrowing feathers is not a quick one. And certainly in kind of contemporary ethnography, you've got lots of accounts of parrots being brought into the community from kind of out in the forest and then being brought in and being looked after as sort of children or kin, you know, particularly by women, they'd hand feed them, kind of give them food out of their own mouths. Not uh this isn't necessarily for taparage, by the way, but you know, in kind of how parrots are treated for their feathers today in a lot of Brazilian communities. And so there does seem to be this real, you know, relationship of care in a lot of Brazilian Indigenous communities and whether that existed when these tapurage feathers were is, you know, a bit of a speculative leap by me, but I think thinking more generally about it, it's a weird one where you have this duality of kinship and family and inclusion in a community, but also that in being part of that community, you have to give something back, and that isn't necessarily a non-traumatic or non-violent exchange that you know this process of plucking is one that is costly. So yeah, I I don't really know how I ended up in terms of what I felt about taparage. I think it's really beautiful and you know, as I say, the object stops me in my tracks whenever I see it and represents this really intriguing and interesting example of indigenous science where, you know, this isn't something that we have lab results about. It's not something that there are scientifics written on, scientific um papers written on, but there is this huge legacy of what must have been quite a lot of experimentation and kind of, you know, a real understanding of, you know, avian husbandry in order to produce this from an Indigenous context that is really interesting, but also is quite a timeline of, I think, you know, bird pain and probably quite a lot of bird suffering. So it really depends, as ever, with these things on what perspective you look at with them.

Care, Kinship, And Cost To Birds

Claudia Hirtenfelder 16:07

Yeah, and it's probably a combination of of both, right? This idea that, you know, uh care comes up a lot. And the idea that care is somehow harm-free is often framed as, you know, that it's a this or a that, but I think rarely is that uh the case. Um, and do you have any, like I was I was just trying to see now some because actually parrots have never featured on the animal highlights. And I was just wondering, do you have any sort of um you know facts or ideas about things parrots do? Because they're pretty ingenious little birds. And I mean they're one of the few species that can speak. That much I I know, and of course, you've got um the work of was it Alex? No, Pepper, Dr. Pepperberg. Is that the one who kept the African Grey and told him how to count? And but yeah, I don't know, like did you did you come across any sort of interesting um or or tidbits about parrots?

Rosa Dyer 17:00

Well, I mean, they are like they are amazing. I must say I have quite quite a bit of personal experience. We have uh my mum owns a rescue um African Grey, so I and has done for a very long time. So I'm not in any kind of like scientific fact-giving, but I must say, as having grown up with one in my household, they are amazing and they're hugely intelligent.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 17:20

And um And they have long lifespans, don't they?

Rosa Dyer 17:23

Really long lifespans, yeah. So um I think yeah, um, if treated well, I think they can live to like between 60 and 80, maybe. I'm not completely sure. We've certainly had our parrot for 35 years and he's still going strong. Um so yeah, they're there. I think what really strikes me, he's called Gus our parrot. Um what really strikes you about him is the kind of um it's a very alternative kind of intelligence, if that makes sense. Like it's very different from human intelligence, or you know, um, I've got dogs and horses as well. It's very different from that kind of intelligence. It's very different from us, but also just yeah, he I they're amazing, amazing birds that I think with Gus, there's always a sense of kind of bargaining with him, but he really understands there's a transactional aspect to like I I will get back in my container if you give me a biscuit, but not until kind of thing.

Parrot Intelligence And Lived Experience

Social Parrots And New Research

Claudia Hirtenfelder 18:20

Um I've always kind of appreciated the fact that I'm gonna go. I mean, I know I recently saw that they've now, you know, there's this huge upswell in kind of creating games for animals, particularly for animals who are kept or who tend towards being social and might be kept uh alone or in isolated situations. And parrots are, of course, quite social birds. And I recently saw uh a post where researchers are experimenting with having virtual calls for parrots. So literally like a Zoom call where the parrot can see different pictures of different parrots who are in other houses far away, and they can select which parrot they want to talk to. And these parrots have taken to it. They they click a parrot and they tend to have a preference for which parrot they want to chat with. So it means that they're able to form these connections virtually with parrots who aren't in the same room as them. Um it's all relatively experimental and new research that's happening, but it's quite, I mean, just to say this alternative research, because that's not something a dog can do, right? A dog can't sit and look at an online screen and say, well, there's another dog on the screen, and I'm gonna click that and have this virtual conversation with. So yeah, it's wild. But I'll I'll find the details of that and I'll put it in the uh the end notes of this episode. Okay, well, thank you so much, Rosa. Uh, this is really interesting. Um, I'll make sure to go and check out the picture of the headrest as well. Uh, thank you, thank you, thank you so much for this highlight. Let me just see good. Thank you, Rosa Dyer, for a wonderful animal highlight and for co-hosting this episode with me. Thank you also to Rebecca Shim for designing the logo for the animal highlight and doing all of the episode artwork. Bad music was done by Gordon Clark. Another sound effects you hear come from BBC Sound Effects, Pixabay, and Epidemic Sound. This episode was produced by myself.

Closing Credits And Acknowledgements

Siobhan O'Sullivan 20:13

This is the Animal Highlight with me, Paulia Hurtenthalder.com. That's I R O A R P O D.com.