Nehaveigur

It dawned on me that my species probably does not really know the half of it about beauty. Not like the birds do and other dinosaurs did. They have been experimenting with bright colors for a hundred million years. I’m a mammal and mammals don’t do beauty much. We mammals are almost all some shade of brown, and brown is the default color nature adopts when it is not trying to be ‘colourful’. We mammals almost never grow bright-coloured plumes or manes. We grunt and shriek but we rarely sing, let alone as tunefully as birds.
Most mammals don’t even do much colour vision and those of us that do have a paltry three colour receptors, two of which (red and green) are pretty close together in wavelength terms. Birds, insects, fish – they all must think of us mammals as grim, dull, utilitarian, monochrome bores. Mantis shrimps have up to sixteen different colour receptors in their eyes and a unique ability to see circularly polarised light […] So when we humans beings wax lyrical about the beauty of a bird of paradise or a sunset, we are mere beginners, naïve dullards glimpsing what the real gods of colour can do, and not appreciating it in its full glory […] Perhaps my obsession with birds is rooted in a form of envy. I wish I could see like a bird and grow feathers like a bird. And perhaps I need to slough off my mammalian obsession with rhyme and reason – rather than fun and show. Mammals are prose; birds are poetry.

Matt Ridley: Birds, Sex & Beauty