Featured on PDR in the collection Many-Colored Misdirection: Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom (1909)

When first looking upon the untitled frontispiece of Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom (1909), one is not quite sure what the kaleidoscope of color represents. Turning the page to find the title “Peacock in the Woods”, the reader flips back to pick the bird out from its surround, but does so only with some difficulty — the very challenge that painter Abbott Handerson Thayer ascribed to predators of the spectacularly-adorned creature. In this one scene, Thayer extravagantly displays many of the techniques used by animals to achieve invisibility. The colored spots and streaks obliterate its silhouette. Green feathers on its back become foliage, while the copper feathers alternately mimic sunlit and shadowed tree bark and rock. The iridescent ocelli — smallest and dimmest near the…