A paper published last year in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface described a feather as a masterpiece of engineering, one comprising nine orders of magnitude, from the nanoscale to the meter ...

What is heavier: 1 kilogram of feathers or 1 kilogram of steel? Whilst the answer to this classic riddle is that they both weigh the same amount, it may be surprising to discover that the color of a ...

A Fork-tailed Flycatcher. Credit: Valentina Gómez-Bahamón, Field Museum Bird feathers have many different functions. Softer down keeps a bird warm and stiffer wing feathers are used for flight.

Have you ever looked at a bird and wondered, how can it be so red or so blue or so intensely yellow? Well, if you have, then you and several researchers have something in common. A new study finds ...

Because birds live outdoors, there's an assumption that they're dirty and harbor many insect pests among their feathers. But this is very wide of the mark: Birds are as clean as cats, spending almost ...

Lined with endless rows of white cabinets, Harvard’s Ornithology Collection is imposing — even mausoleum-like — upon first glance; it’s only after opening the drawers that the true colors of the ...

A Scissor-Tailed Flycatcher takes flight on the front cover of the new chapbook "Words of a Feather" with poems inspired by Kansas birds. Many of us have been spending more time outside during the ...