Member-only story
ART | DESIGN | CREATIVITY | COLORS | FILM
You can learn a lot from a chicken: Color 101
How one little hen’s fascination with color led to an amazing discovery
You might believe chickens know hardly anything about color, but chickens actually know more about color than people do!
Fun Fact: People and chickens have red, blue and green light-sensing cones in their eyed. But chicken have another kind of cones that people don’t have — ultraviolet light-sensing cones!
Even so, you will never hear a chicken saying these words.
Nanny, nanny, boo-boo, I see colors better than you.
Chickens don’t like to flaunt their good fortune, so they don’t mind sharing what they know with others.
Pearl’s love for collecting colors and words
Colors are especially interesting to Pearl who is a collector of interesting things. She collects colorful scraps of paper that blow out of the trash truck on Trash Truck Tuesdays. She also collects words for colors.
She explains it quite simply.
“Chickens don’t truly own anything, and we are fine with that. The only thing I ever really owned was my eggshell which I outgrew when it was time to hatch.
“We don’t have hands to carry things around, and although we could carry some things around in our beaks, that would really get in the way of hunting for worms and bugs.
“Words are something I can collect and take with me anywhere I want. Names of colors are the best words to collect. When I say the word, and I see the color in my mind even if I don’t see it with my eyes.”
With all of her goofiness, Pearl is quite wise.
Alternate colors with obscure names
Never one to be inclined toward ordinariness, Pearl began to collect alternative lists of rainbow colors beyond the red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet kind.
Colors are best judged when adjacent to other colors. They can look one way…
