This Stunning Collection of Bird Portraits Explores the Nature of Beauty

The diversity of birds continues to amaze us. Their colorful plumages, fascinating ecologies, and complex behaviors enrich our lives and challenge our imaginations. In an entrancing collection, Birds (Abrams, November 2, 2021), photographer Tim Flach invites us to wonder anew at avian diversity—capturing with his camera awe-inspiring images of natural phenomena that I explore in the book’s accompanying text. 

With their sensuous textures, striking color patterns, and whimsical highlights, birds’ beauty certainly delights us, but its real audience is birds themselves. Avian ornaments have evolved through their capacity to intrigue, entrance, inform, and attract mates. In this way, birds are agents in their own evolution. 

Birds have complex, four-color visual systems and intricate social lives filled with rich opportunities for intimate individual interactions. As a result, they have evolved a tremendous diversity of plumage and facial ornaments that function in their social and sexual communication.

Below are just a handful of the stunning species we feature in the book: 
 

A dazzling Gouldian Finch, left, and a Common Flameback Woodpecker showing off its wing spots. Photos: Tim Flach

Then neck wattles of the Temmick's Tragopan, left, and the crest of the Pink Cockatoo are hidden from sight until they are suddenly revealed. Photos: Tim Flach

Both sexes of the Inca Tern, left, sport a red beak and fleshy bright yellow gape patches—and a snowy white mustache that flutters in the wind as they fly. The King Vulture is a largely silent bird with an extremely colorful head that it bows during courtship. Photos: Tim Flach

The lustrous colors of the Splendid Starling are produced by layers of hollow, air-filled, pancake-shaped melanin granules in their feather barbules. The iridescent play of colors over the plumage is punctuated by black spots on the tips of their wing coverts that have dense arrays of upwardly curved barbules, creating microscopic cavities that trap light. Photo: Tim Flach

The Andean Condor, a soaring South American apex scavenger, is the only New World vulture in which males and females are visibly different. While all Andean Condors have a dense, fuzzy white collar that distinguishes the species from its desert-loving California cousin, only males, like this one, have a comb atop their heads. Photo: Tim Flach

The imposing Marabou Stork is a scavenger and predator of the open country and wetlands of sub-Saharan Africa. Like New World and Old World vultures, this stork has evolved a nearly naked head and neck with sparse coating of fine bristle feathers, which provides a hygienic advantage for carrion eaters. Photo: Tim Flach

The Greater Bird-of-Paradise inhabits the lowland forests of central New Guinea, and males, like the one pictured here, display in treetop leks. The amazing diversity of plumage and display behavior of birds of paradise have evolved through sexual selection, reminding us of the power of female mate choice in shaping the beauty of birds. Photo: Tim Lach

Bulwer's Pheasant. Photo: Tim Flach

From Birds by Tim Flach, copyright © 2021 Tim Flach. By permission of Abrams, an imprint of ABRAMS, New York, NY. All rights reserved.