Dec 24, 2025
Prep No.KHE97
Spangled Cotinga
Cotinga cayana
Above: with flash
Below: without flash
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Prep No.KHE97
Spangled Cotinga
Cotinga cayana
Above: with flash
Below: without flash
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Rambling About Structural Color
This week’s prep is a Spangled Cotinga. Cotingas are so vibrantly colorful. It’s wonderful. I love how he stands out against the other preps (only some of which are mine).
In birds, blue is a structural color, meaning it’s more like an optical illusion created by light reflecting off the feather rather than deposited like pigment. The wine red of the cotinga’s throat is pigment, but the gorgeous aqua blue is structural. I found it really difficult to get good photos of this bird because of that.
So I took some with flash and some without. Compared to in person, Left: flash makes him a little too green, and Right: makes him a little too blue. In the lab, he appeared somewhere in between.
Our perception of the structural color also changes when the feathers are wet, so it’s easier to see the actual pigment. From right above, the wet feathers look purplish like the throat patch, but from a low angle, they still look fairly blue.
Prep No.KHE97
Spangled Cortinga
Cotinga cayana
Just a few more pretty pictures because I enjoyed this guy so much
Skinning used to be the step that took the longest, now it’s preening. I’m still not perfect but the right is where I finished compared to a half hour earlier on the left. It doesn’t look like much but it is surprisingly time consuming.
Prep No.KHE97
Spangled Cotinga
Cotinga cayana
Prep No.KHE97
Spangled Cotinga
Cotinga cayana
What made this bird extra difficult was that it was a captive zoo bird that was necropsied after death. Vets usually aren’t usually super careful about their cuts, which is fair but frustrating so making a decent skin out of a necropsied bird requires lots of extra sewing.
Top left: abdominal cavity opened, guts removed and viscera stuck to various feathers
Top right: Back of the head and skull cut open. I sewed this up the wrong way the first time time and had to try again. Here’s the back of the head after. There’s a slight break in the feathers, but it’s pretty subtle.
Above: We usually only cut from the top of the sternum to the vent. The vet cut all the way up the neck, and that was a bit of a challenge.
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