Getting the jay blues

I've been tinkering with this Ghost site for a while now and have become particularly obsessed with finding a shade of blue to communicate my affinity for the Eurasian jay.

It started with an article by Alice Sun in Audubon magazine that introduced me to Robert Ridgway, an American ornithologist who created a pioneering colour dictionary based on the hues of nature in 1912.

Another article came up, this time from National Geographic. While it was great to know others had attempted to pinpoint the colours of bird feathers, I was no closer to finding a standard for the distinctive blue of a jay's covert feathers.

My next read was a real eye opener, Eryk Salvaggio discussing colour as a dataset, and the history of the colours we use to describe nature - and everything else - today. Cached away like a tasty acorn within this article was a link to designer Nicholas Rougeux's efforts to connect one of the earliest colour dictionaries to modern day digital colour codes.

Abraham Gottlob Werner, a German mineralogist, created his Nomenclature of Colours to describe rocks, comparing the hues he saw to others in nature from birds to plants. Werner's catalogue was illustrated by Scottish botanical illustrator Patrick Symes and published in 1814. You can imagine my delight in discovering Blue 31, or Berlin Blue: wing feathers of jay / hepatica / sapphire. Rougeux has painstakingly translated the 1821 publication of the work into hex equivalents and so I found #7994b5. At last, my blue! But does it look a little murky to you?

So, jays don't actually have blue pigmented feathers, they're brown. The vibrant blue is a trick of the light, achieved through structural colour. Researchers at the University of Sheffield investigated how this works and using x-rays, they discovered each of the feather barbs has a network of polygonal cells containing nanostructures which scatter light waves. "[Jays] are able to pattern different colours along an individual feather barb – the equivalent to having many different colours along a single human hair," summarises Kirstin Colvin in an article for The European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) where the research took place.

That complicates things. Garrulus glandarius blue isn't a pigment, nor even a single shade. I feel I'm entering my own Blue Period a la Picasso. Looking to art for inspiration might not be a bad idea though... Check back for the next installment in my search.