Yuroks and condors and feathers (25)

This afternoon on the way home from a geocaching outing in San Jose, we were listening to NPR and a story about the restoration project of the Yurok Tribe of northern California of the California condor (Gymnogyps californianus, or in Yurok, prey-go-neesh). The official Yurok Tribe account of the project can be found here. It's inspiring and hopeful. As the website explains, the condor has "been spiritually tied to the Yurok Hikelonah—the cultural and ecological landscape—since the beginning of the world.  Condors feature prominently in the Tribe's origin narrative, and its feathers and songs are foundational components of Yurok World Renewal ceremonies." And now they Yurok are actively engaged in extending the range of the condor, which was as good as extinct in the 1980s.

That got me wondering about condor feathers, and about California Indian regalia. So I went a-googling. I didn't find much, but I did find these: 

A condor feather cape of the Wailaki
Tribe of central California,
late 1800s (see related article)

Regalia used in the Yurok Sacred Jump Dance,
one of three dances enacted every two years
in the fall to bring balance back to the world

The making of these regalia has recently gotten renewed attention in an annual(?) culture camp started by David Severns twenty years ago. And here is another article about the condor's importance to Yurok spirituality.

But then I stumbled on the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service's Feather Atlas: Flight Feathers of North American Birds. There's the condor, of course—which is what brought me here in the first place (check it out: the longest feather here is 64 cm/25 inches long!):

But look—hummingbirds! Rufous hummingbird (Selasphorus rufus) tail feathers (3 cm/1 in), to be precise:

And belted kingfishers (Megaceryle alcyon)!

And I could go on, but I'll just stop with northern (red-shafted) flickers (Colaptes auratus), because they are very well named.

I love it when I start out looking into one thing, and end up in a totally different realm that I never even imagined existed.