Wild honey, hot ducks, and lesser loved jewels

Hello Fulvous

When I was a kid, my parents let us stay up late to watch Seinfeld every week. It was the only adult show we were allowed to watch, and I suspect it was because had a real affinity for Jerry. People used to stop him on the street and tell him he looked like Jerry Seinfeld. Once, when I was 12, a couple girls on a playground told me he was “hot” because he looked like Jerry Seinfeld, and that remains one of the most baffling encounters I’ve ever had.

But! Let’s get back to it. There’s an episode of Seinfeld in which Jerry is dating a beautiful woman whose name rhymes with a body part. But he can’t remember her name, nor the part, he just knows it does something productive. Mulva? Ragina? (No, it’s DOLORES!) This is a roundabout way of explaining why I’ve never written about this color before. I hate its name! Fulvous. FULVOUS. Can you imagine naming your child that? No, me neither.

When you’re researching obscure colors, you’ll often get struck by the sheer beauty of those syllables. Jonquil, cerulean, azure, celadon, crimson, fawn—listen to those whispery sing-song words. Then there’s the words that clomp around, like dun. Puce. Fulvous. (Are u-sounds ugly or do I just associate them with the word ugly? No way of knowing!)

But fulvous isn’t a bad color. It’s a gentle orange tone, far quieter than blaze orange but richer and more toothsome than melon. It’s mustard mixed with tomato with a dash of burnt-toast brown. You might know it as “tawny,” which is a very old color word, older even than orange. Like tawny, fulvous is an animal color. But while tawny tends to refer to hides and skins (it comes from tan, which is a color and an action, don’t forget), fulvous is for feathers.

The most famous fulvous thing is the Fulvous whistling duck. It makes a cheep-y squeaky sound that sounds exactly like my dead dog Deja chewing on her favorite lamb toy. According to The Cornell Lab (All About Birds!) the Fulvous whistling duck has “a high-pitched, whistling kee-chee, often given in flight.” I listened to every clip available and they all sound the same. I had hoped for something more impressive or musical, but that’s a hard truth I’ve learned about birds. Their sounds are just fine, but their feathers are fabulous. Which is why I bother with one and not the other.

Although robins are technically red-breasted, after looking at hundreds of pictures of birds, I have come to conclude that their feathers are rather fulvous too (especially on the females). Lots of birds have this amber-rust tone, especially the ones I spot around New England. It makes sense; fulvous is a color familiar to our landscape. We’re not the tropics. Birds don’t need emerald or fuchsia. They just need a little splash of amber to stand out against the silver birches (or to blend in with the dead papery leaves still clinging to the beech).

Once, years ago, there was a very hot duck that settled his feathers in Central Park. I was actually in New York when it happened (a true rarity), so I went looking for the duck. I didn’t find the famously sexy duck, but I followed news of his arrival and departure avidly. He was a Mandarin duck and his body was colorblocked with a series of striking jewel tones and black-and-white stripes. But his wings were fulvous and there was a patch of fulvous creeping up his white head. Now, fulvous is the color of daylily blossoms, which are as boring as robins if you live in New England. But fulvous can be gorgeous when you watch long enough to see the light move and dance a bit. When you let it come alive, you start to appreciate that animal quality. When you see it go bronze and gold, when it gets that metallic, oily, iridescent quality—then fulvous is lovely. Sweet as the dark wildflower honey my in-laws bring from Ohio. (It doesn’t taste like grocery store honey—it’s homey and floral and a bit funky, if I’m honest. I like it best in tea.)

Fulvous is like amber. I think we forget when we’re talking about “jewel tones” that some jewels are brown. Amber and citrine and topaz all have such incredible appeal. Amber was once so prized that peasants were hanged for the crime of picking up glowing pebbles on the beach (where it washed up freely, a gift of the Baltic). Even smoky quartz is a reminder that dirty snow gray can be delightful if you let the light in. Color needs light—this is true of all color, because color is light. But I think we give light to things. We give them beauty when we turn our attention towards them. The hot duck wasn’t just hot because he was a hot duck, he was also alluring because his strangeness made so many people stop and pay attention to ducks. How often does that happen?