a feathered object (bird)
A game of walking, and of the feathers that places are.
What it is
Press reveal feathers and a handful lights up across the stretch of moor you're looking at. Put your shoes on, go out, and collect as many as you can reach. Each one, as you arrive, turns out to be a particular feather — the one that spot has always been. Bring them home and they are kept in the reckoning: a flock of walks, and no two of them alike.
How to play
- Frame the moor you fancy on the map — pinch and drag to the ground you'd actually walk.
- Press reveal feathers. Icons appear at real places across the circle you can see.
- The toy starts looking for your feet the moment you touch it — your phone will ask permission once, and after that it simply knows. Walk to a feather; when you reach it, it is yours, grown right there from the ground you are standing on.
- Press centre map to jump the map back to your own dot and zoom in — scout ahead down the cleugh, then press it and you have your feet again.
- Press bring them home to keep the walk's feathers in the reckoning below.
- Turn the dial on the rim to choose which bird wears your finds — snipe, curlew, wagtail, any of the flock.
- The toy has two modes. Expedition is the walk: feet on, feathers to find and keep. Armchair is for looking without walking — tap the map to see the feather of anywhere, and plan tomorrow's walk. Tap a mode's name to switch; you only keep the feathers you actually stand on.
- Press the sheet to turn the map over: the Ordnance Survey Explorer for British ground, or the whole world for everywhere else. The feathers are the same either way.
Sending a walk to someone
Press share this walk and your walk goes out as one picture: your bird, wearing the feathers you found, and beneath her a little map of the walk — every place you stood, in its true spot, joined in the order you walked them, with a compass and a scale, and the grid references footnoted small beneath for the curious. It drops straight into a chat, no link and nothing to open. A bird and her ground, and nothing to explain.
The reckoning, and keeping it safe
Every walk you bring home is kept in the reckoning — each feather a place you have stood. It lives in your phone, in this page, between visits. To keep it truly safe — for a new phone, or a cleared browser — press download: it makes a small keepsake file. You never need to open that file yourself; just keep it somewhere. When you want your flock back, press open a reckoning and hand it the file. That is the whole of it.
The daft name
"A feathered object (bird)" is a phrase lifted from a serious academic paper on drawing a feather by mathematics — Streit and Heidrich's A Biologically-Parameterized Feather Model. For one line the formal language curls up into a small feral poetry creature: a feathered object, bird. The whole toy lives inside that parenthesis.
How the feathers are made
A feather is the same thing as a place. Every grid reference on the moor grows one particular feather, by a fixed piece of maths seeded from the coordinate — so a place always grows the same feather, down to the last barb. The moor is not a surface with feathers scattered on it; it is a surface made of feathers, one at every point, invisible until you walk to it and it develops in the hand. (The maths is borrowed from Feaffer, the feather workshop that grew out of that same paper.)
Le Bureau international des oiseaux et plumes imaginaires
This began on one moor, and named its squares the way that moor is named: by Ordnance Survey grid reference, NY 7235 5462 and the like. Which is beautiful, and stops at the coast.
But the world is made of feathers too, and it seemed unfair that a walker in Köln or Reykjavík or Ushuaia should be held back by the edge of a British map sheet. So a Bureau was founded, with the full solemnity such an institution deserves, and its position is this: where a nation has a grid, the Bureau recognises it; where there is none, the Bureau issues its own.
Press the sheet to turn the map over — the Ordnance Survey Explorer, or the whole world. Britain keeps her own grid references on either sheet, so nothing you have ever found has changed or ever will; and everywhere else is named in 32U LB 5668 4485, which is the international grid, and reads like exactly what it is: a grid reference, ten metres square, for a place that had none.
A feather is still the same thing as a place. There are simply more places now.
The moon-birds
The birds are moons. Each is a crescent — a moon-shape — dressed in a few imaginary feathers and drawn by mathematics, for no better reason than that their maker can't draw a bird any other way. The flock keeps growing, from the lapwing to the barn owl, each with a field-guide page of her own: her plain facts, how she sounds, an old augury, her egg, and here and there a note from real ground.
The place, and the why
This is a moor in the North Pennines — the South Tyne and its tributaries, the fells above Eals, the particular ground its maker walks with the dog. The feeling it is after is the jug by the back door: the real collection of real moor-gifts, each one tied forever to the exact spot it was found. We are making a moor that never runs out of that feeling.
A feather is the same thing as a place.