Ologies with Alie Ward - Plumology (FEATHERS) with Allison Shultz

Episode Date: March 31, 2020

Plumage! Sexy dances! Feather heists! Possible holographic disco birds? Natural History Museum of LA ornithology curator Dr. Allison Shultz is a professional plumologist aka feather expert. We visit the museum’s collection of rare specimens and chat about everything from fossilized dinosaur feathers to silent owl flight to furry bird legs to why pigeons are so loud, peacock tails, down parkas, quill pens, heavy metal flautists, feather thieves, pigments, flight feathers, Vantablack, if you can eat feathers and why birdwatching is like seeing tiny purple raccoons zoom overhead. Birds: like Pokemon Go but weirder. Visit Dr. Allison Shultz’s website allisonshultz.com and follow twitter.com/ajshultz622 A donation went to: birdnet.com/oc Sponsor links: Kiwico.com/ologies; Dispea.com/ologies More links at alieward.com/ologies/plumology Transcripts & bleeped episodes at: alieward.com/ologies-extras Become a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: www.Patreon.com/ologies OlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes and STIIIICKERS! Follow twitter.com/ologies or instagram.com/ologies Follow twitter.com/AlieWard or instagram.com/AlieWard Sound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media & Steven Ray Morris Theme song by Nick ThorburnSupport the show: http://Patreon.com/ologies

Oh hey, it's cauliflower rice, which smells like farts and knows that you have your doubts, but is excited to prove you wrong, Alieward. Back with another episode of oligies. This one's just light as a feather, nothing but wall-to-wall behavior and biology and trivia and weirdness and history. Let's get into it. But first, I want to thank you to everyone who buys oligies merch at oligiesmerch.com. Thank you to everyone supporting on patreon.com slash oligies and for everyone who tells

friends or rates the show on iTunes or subscribes that keeps it up in the charts or reviews, which you know, I creep gently. So I can pull a fresh catch each week, like this one from the Dusty Wrangler who says, hearing how normal all these scientists are is making returning back to school a lot less intimidating and that's just what I needed. One thing though, now every time I wash my hands, I do hear you whispering in my ear to milk my thumbs. And I only resent that a little bit.

Thanks for the reminder. Thank you to the Dusty Wrangler for that and all the reviewers, especially also to Mike, the nighttime nurse for listening and much more so for saving lives. We love y'all. Okay. Plumology. Did you know this was a thing? I did not.

So it comes from the Latin for down or for first beard and later plume came to mean like a stream of smoke. So we're talking all manner of feathers. Oh, feathers. Now, I have already covered ornithology. It came out in November, 2019, early adopter. Now in case any bird nerds have not found it, go way on back, you'll find ornithology. But I was thrilled when thisologist at the Natural History Museum of LA suggested via

email that there were many, many more sub-ologies with feathered friends, including them dang feathers themselves. So I made haste to the museum one sleepy Wednesday afternoon right before they closed for the day, and I met up with thisologist who was wearing a flowery blouse and a museum ID on a dangling lanyard. And she got her bachelor's, studying birds at UC Berkeley, and got her master's from San Diego State and her PhD at Harvard working on the genomics of bird feather colors and organismic and evolutionary biology.

Now as a newish curator of ornithology at the NHM LA, she met me at the entrance and then led me through the staff only behind the scenes, through the shuttered hall of dioramas now off limits to the public, past cases and cases of taxidermy specimens dating back a few hundred years, through more doors to the archive of hundreds of thousands of birds in the museum's collections. Let me go get a step stool. Me! Oh yeah, they go all the way up.

Oh my god. We've got a hundred and twenty-two thousand birds specimens. One hundred and twenty-two thousand! You know, you've been here a year. How do you get used to where everything is? Have you opened up each one of these? I have not opened up all of them. They're like the only certain ones that I open up over and over again.

Yeah, yeah. Because they're like, okay, this is where the cool stuff is. And then we went to her bright and airy office, and we took a seat before a few stuffed specimens and a tray waiting for us, and I asked her all the quilled questions that would rattle out of my dome, as well as yours. So shake off the dust and get ready to soar the sky and learn about what makes a feather a feather, how they evolved, why they're important, the sounds they can make, the longest bird tail, some feather heists, sexual selection gossip, peacock plumes, bird spotting, iridescence,

blackest black, tiny feathers, huge ones, dinosaur myths, and mysteries and more, with feather researcher and professional plumeologist Dr. Allison Schultz. Now, you are a plumeologist? Yeah, so I'm a plumeologist. I study bird feathers and how they evolve, and kind of more specifically, I think about the colors of feathers, but the structure and the development, all of that is integral into the whole picture. I did not know this was an actual study, and when you emailed me, I was like, fingers

igniting the keyboard, like, yeah, I was so excited. So you're an ornithologist, and then plumeology is kind of a subset of it? Exactly, yeah. So it's not actually the only thing I do, but it's probably one of my favorite things that I do, because bird feathers are amazing, they're beautiful, they're gorgeous. I mean, this is a very stupid question, just right off the top. Do any other living animals on the planet have feathers that are birds? No living animals.

Okay, okay. So actually, we used to think that that was one of the defining characteristics of birds was feathers, but once they started finding feathers in all of these non-avian dinosaurs, that became not true anymore, so now we know that feathers evolved long before birds did. And all birds are dinosaurs? All birds are dinosaurs. Yes, that is true. That still rocks me.

Like living dinosaurs. Yeah, you know, it's one of my, I participate in DinoFest now. You know, we have a table representing living dinosaurs, and it's funny to me how many of the kids actually know that birds are dinosaurs and adults don't, so it's like, the perspective is shifting, but we're not quite there yet. Now, what about her as a kiddo? Was she an itty-bitty bird nerd? Did you always like birds?

You know, I'm not one of those kids that grew up loving birds. I always loved animals, and I always loved biology, but I was like actually a big cat lover. I used to go to the zoo. I loved zoo books. I loved documentaries. It wasn't really until college I took this class, Natural History of the Vertebrates, where we went on field trips every week and learned about birds, and then I took ornithology

the next year and started doing fieldwork and working in museums, and that's kind of, that class was really what did it for me and what led to this whole career. And was there a moment in the class, like, was there a particular chapter or like a, some kind of photo where you're like, hot, diggity? This is really cool. Oh, that's a good question. I don't think it was like a chapter or photo. It was actually, I think, more of a field trip when I could actually start to identify

the birds myself with my field guides. So I think I remember the first one that I identified was the tricky one was a hermit thrush, and I was very proud of myself. What is it with birding? Why do you think bird people are so bird people? That's a great question. I think it's because, well, birds are a thing that you can actually do all the time. Birds are all around us, and there are different ones everywhere.

So it's like, once you get into it, you start realizing, oh my gosh, I can, you know, go to the beach and look at some birds, and I can go to mountains and look at different birds. There are also, you know, rare birds that show up at the same, at some time. So I think there are a lot of people that, like, have a collector in them, and that makes them really love kind of birding. And also, birds, I think they're just fascinating creatures. They're so beautiful, and they're so different than us in many ways.

I think that draws a lot of people to them as well. It's kind of like Pokemon Go without a phone, right? Making us just like Pokemon. Yeah. I wonder if there's something about people who like scavenger hunts and kind of augmented reality that love birding. Like, I don't know, my friend Sarah used to really be into geocaching, and she's become an avid birder, and she's always been that kind of adventurer.

And I wonder if there's something about, like, going out to collect things, but not actually killing them and taking them home. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. It could be. One thing about birds is you can go out, and you are almost guaranteed to see birds, no matter where you go, even in the middle of the city. You know, there's tons of species that we see here.

And unlike mammals, for example, I mean, you might see some mammals, like squirrels and things, but you're not going to see, like, 60 different species in one day. And most of them aren't active, kind of, you know, when we would be active, so you would mostly be seeing sign like scat or burrows and things like that, not quite as satisfying in my mind. Making it a turd isn't as satisfying as seeing a beautiful turd versus bird. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, if there were tiny flying raccoons everywhere in different colors, can you imagine

like a tiny flying possum that was like purple? That would be pretty amazing. Yeah. But as we have birds that are that. Exactly. Which is why birds rule. So, okay, feathers. Yeah.

Is a feather like a modified hair, what's happening? That's a great question. There's somewhat related to hair since that they're made out of keratin, and they're, you know, an external structure that grows out of the skin, but they're actually much more related to scales. What? So, yeah. So, so both feathers and hair are made out of keratin, but different kinds of keratin.

There's this kind of keratin called alpha keratin that mostly makes up hairs and our fingernails and we like mammalian structures, whereas beta keratin is what makes up bird feathers and actually more reptile scales and things like that. Okay. Beta keratins are the proteins that make reptile and bird scales badass and tough and waterproof, but they are not to be confused with beta keratin, which is a pigment that makes fruits and veggies orange and which gets converted into retinol and it keeps our skin and our eyes healthy.

So, that is beta keratin. We eat it with ranch dressing. Now, beta keratin, again, is in birdie scales and beaks and claws and feathers, which evolved from scales. Imagine something like an alligator scale splintered into thousands of fluffy shreds selected through millions of years of getting it on. Boom. You have feathers.

Well, you don't, but birds do. So, it's kind of like a scale just got elongated a little bit. Yeah. You know, they started at scales and if you think about it, birds actually still have scales on their feet. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And that's something that we forget.

And feathers are such complex structures that they, we do think that they first started off as kind of very simple, like think of like a just a simple, almost hair-like structure and then evolve these more and more elaborate structures. And so, do you think that they were more like quills, like a porcupine quill? No, they would have been soft. They would probably look a lot like fur. So, a bunch of dinos had fur-esque proto feathers and they were stomping around like big fuzzy muppets.

And even before Archaeopteryx, which was a raven-sized feathered avian dinosaur, long-considered history's first bird, flight feathers were all over the place in dinosaurs. Also, while researching this aside, I accidentally found out, you want to hear something weird? The T-Rexers had wishbones, nothing to do with feathers. I just think it's weird. T-bones had big old honking wishbones, like a turkey. Oh, life, y'all. Anyway, but the feathers came first and then the flight.

You know, feathers, you think of them as being really important for flight, which of course they are, but feathers evolved long before flight did. So, they actually didn't evolve for flight. They were co-opted to be used in flight. You can look at the microscopic structure of feathers and actually see the shapes of the pigment molecules in them that correspond to different types of pigments and how they're placed. And so, we actually can reconstruct what the probable color was of some of these dinosaurs.

So, for example, a micro-raptor, which is this really cool relative of early birds that had, we think they had actually four wings, so both their front legs and their hind legs all had, you know, the flight feathers on them, so they probably used them all for flight. We think they were iridescent, kind of like a blackbird or a starling or something like that. And that's based on the color of the kind of pigment capsules? Yeah, so it's based on how the pigment capsules are arranged. Oh, my God.

Yeah. The mechanisms of color and how they're produced, that's like one of my favorite topics of study. What did you think of the feather-trapped in amber that was found like 10 years ago? Someone just bought a chunk of amber at like a market and they're like, holy smokes, this is a dinosaur feather. Yeah, a dinosaur feather, you know, pretty much looks like a real regular feather. There's some very cool feathers that they found to be trapped in amber and, you know, found feathers that don't even look like modern feathers.

Okay, so I looked at pictures and there's a 99 million year old tiny baby dinosaur tail and it looks kind of like if you encased a shaft of wheat in a block of fossilized ginger rail. So obviously they have evolved and changed over the millions of years, but all of this just makes the, holy shit, a seagull is a dinosaur? So much clearer knowing that these paleo-lizard scales got shreddy and long, thereby helping them take flight. But what are feathers exactly?

So walk me through the anatomy of a feather. There's like the main shaft, almost like a leaf has a vein and then the one's off the side, what's going on? Yeah, that's a good question. So okay, so our typical kind of feather structure when you think of what a feather looks like. So yeah, so the main shaft, we call that the rachis and so that's, you know, there's going to be this part that actually has all of these little branching structures and a part that's bare, that's at the bottom and that's what's going to be attached to the skin.

You know, if you think of like a writing quill, that's where you would dip the ink in and use to write with. And so those little branching structures off of the main shaft, we call those feather barbs. And each of those feather barbs actually has little branching shafts off of them. These are hard to see with your eye, but you actually can if you look really, really closely called barbules. And in many feathers, especially feathers that need to be strong like flight feathers, the barbules also have these little tiny hooks that we call barbis cells that actually link

them together. So think about if you find like a feather on the ground and you kind of break it, you know what I mean? Like you can split the different barbs and you can zip it back together. And so that's actually because you're actually making those little hooklets reattached to each other. So that's how feathers maintain their shape. And they're like little velcro-y kind of a hook?

Exactly. Just like that. Oh my gosh. Okay. I always wondered obviously about that because yeah, you can make a feather look like a hot mess so fast. And then you're like, J.K., I'm all put together and I'm like, who to go feather? Let's do a makeover.

Yeah. How do you feel when you see feathers on costumes and if you see like a vase full of peacock feathers like in a corner, do you have to go up and touch them? Or are you like, oh, what a tragedy that we're using those for decoration. How does a plumologist react to that? Well, I don't feel sad necessarily. I like them. I think they're beautiful.

You know, birds, they lose their feathers every year often. Some mini bird feathers they mull at least once a year if not sooner. So it's not like birds are being harmed to get these feathers. So I don't really see anything wrong with using them in fashion or decor, especially like peacock feathers. I mean, those are some of the most elaborate feathers that you could think of. They're just so cool. So that's usually my reaction.

It's, wow, those are so cool. So yes, peacock feathers just fall off of their butts once a year and peacock farms just go around and pick them up off the ground, which is awesome. So we're done here. No, we're not. My brain said, let's keep googling. So we did. I found that peacocks are native to India and they're the national bird.

So it's illegal to export peacock plumage from there. So most peacock farms are in China and a lot of the birds are slaughtered and plucked and their feathers are sold pretty cheap. So before you go purchasing a bundle off of wish.com for like a buck apiece or say a $25,000 burberry trench coat made of peacock feathers, maybe do some research on the ethics and the origins. I'm talking to you, Anna Wintour. Please don't be mean to me.

Any pop cultural references to feathers, any feathers in movies that really annoy you? When you watch like CGI of birds, like in animated shows, are you ever like, that's not what feathers look like? You know, I've actually been more impressed, especially lately with how well feathers are represented. So I think animators are actually doing a pretty good job of like accurately representing feathers. Yeah.

I feel like the people at Pixar are probably hunkered down over encyclopedias of natural history. Exactly. And you know, they actually, they'll come here to the museum and look at specimens so that they can accurately show how things really are, which is really cool. In terms of functions of feathers, can you walk me through some different varieties, like a menu of feathers? Yeah.

So there are different, feathers have many different functions. And one thing that makes them really interesting to study is that oftentimes they're doing these functions simultaneously. Let's think about this really complex structure and try and understand what it's doing and how it evolved. My specialty is in feather color evolution. And feather color itself has many different functions. And so for example, thermoregulation, birds keeping warm.

That's kind of, you know, one obvious use of feathers. In fact, we've co-opted it for ourselves. Yeah. Think about down jacket. Birds have that built in all the time. And that just, does that trap air so that it retains heat? Exactly. So it's like having this really warm air blanket right next to your skin, basically.

Birds can actually control how warm they want to be by either fluffing themselves up or having the feathers be more flat. So if you think about like a really cold morning, I was in Boston for a really long time. And so, you know, sometimes when it's snowing, you see a bird outside and it looks like a little puffball. And that's because they're increasing how much warm air that they have next to their skin, which is pretty cool. Oh my God, I had no idea they could do that.

Yeah. So they're like, watch this. I'm going to get cuter and warmer. Exactly. I'm adorable. I'm going to become almost a complete sphere. So they have a combination of down, like an undercoat, and then do they have flight feathers on top of it?

Yeah. So there are different types of feathers. So downy feathers are one type of feathers, and those feathers, they don't have like the central rachis in the same way that what we call a contour feather, which is a body feather has or a flight feather would have, and they also don't have all the little hooklets that are going to be hooking their feather barbs and barbules together because they don't need to be hooked together. It's actually better for them to be more unorganized because they can trap air molecules more efficiently

that way. So down on a bird is chaotic good. P.S., some down jacket trivia, because I think it's interesting. They were invented by a dude in 1936 named, you ready for this? Eddie Bauer. That's right. The Eddie Bauer. So Bauer almost died of hypothermia winter fishing and was like, hell no, Mr. Freeze.

You have been thwarted. I'm making a jacket. So then he patented them in 1940. Before we see all down is good, let's look at where that comes from. I thought maybe birds were like done with their down. I wanted to believe and I hate to tell you this, but the best down, oh, this is so terrible is taken from live birds. That does not feel good to the birds, which is why there are so many down alternatives

on the market, which are bird approved. So I'm sorry to be the bearer of heavy feather news, but that's the truth. So there are the contour or body feathers, the warm down feathers underneath, and then what other kind of feathers? There's another type of feathers that's really cool called rictal bristles. So if you ever looked really closely at a bird, like maybe there's a bird called a night char or a bird that is an insect eater, like a fly catcher. You might see like little, they almost look like little hairs coming right around the

bell, almost like whiskers kind of. And so these are special feathers that only have this central rake, so they don't actually have any barbs or barbules. Imagine a lip liner, but made out of false eyelashes, boom, rictal bristles, it's a mood. And for a long time, people didn't know what are these feathers doing. And they thought that, okay, since a lot of these birds that have these are actually insectivores, they're probably funneling insects into their mouth, but actually experimentally showed that wasn't the case, but what they're probably doing is actually protecting the

eyes of the bird. Really? Yeah. So they can't hit themselves on things? Well, more so like little debris doesn't get in the eye. So when you're out chasing a bunch of bugs in the air, your eyes aren't getting, you know, full of junk from there. Oh my God.

Now, what about a horned screamer? What about a horned screamer? What is that dingled angle on top? Well, that's actually, that's like a part of the skull kind of. So yeah. I'm not made of feathers, but actually a hard projection. Oh, I didn't know that. Okay.

I wasn't sure because I have seen pictures in there, terrifying and hilarious. Oh, and during the tour she gave me, Allison showed me that some actually have those bristles in less mouth area places. Wow. And some birds even have modified feathers on their eyes that look like eyelashes, like hornbills. Have you seen that? No.

Is that also to get to, to get debris out? Yeah. To keep debris out? Oh my God. I didn't know that. That's very fancy. During the tour, we also looked at a tray of carrion eaters who were fashionably featherless in the head region.

You don't want a lot of feathers getting in the way of all of your head functions. Makes sense. And birds like condors or vultures, you know, they'll have pretty bare heads. That's true of most carrion eaters because you don't want to be like have your head in a carcass, get all gunky and bloody and then have it all in your feathers. Yeah, it's like, um, someone with a beard eating a cheeseburger. Yeah, exactly. It just kind of grows.

It's all in there. Yeah. I mean, there are other birds that have, you know, crests or other very special feathers. So, you know, we talked about thermoregulation as one use, but one of the other big uses of feathers, of course, is signaling. And so whether that's being cryptic, so you're trying to hide from predators, you know, think about like a kind of a brown bird that's maybe on the ground and hard to see or to become more conspicuous.

So they're actually trying to show off and because plumage color is one of the things that bird can, can actually demonstrate its quality. So it, you know, they actually use their color to attract mates, for example, or to fight off rivals. So, you know, males instead of fighting over a territory or something like that, males will actually be able to just like look at some of these colored patches and decide, oh, this guy's, you know, not worth my time or this guy's going to be a competitor. I better actually fight him.

That's so judgy. That's amazing. They're looking each other up and down, like sizing each other up. Yeah. Like, have you ever seen a red winged black bird, you know, these black birds with red patches? So there was an experiment done, I believe it was in the 80s, where they either made those red patches twice as big or they colored them black so they're half as big or there

was no red patch at all. And they found when they made that red patch twice as big, actually those males were more, they had way more other males attacking them. So males were like, oh my gosh, this guy is totally going to come and steal my territory. I better fight him off right away. Whereas if they made the patch half as big or not red at all, then these males wouldn't get attacked much at all because they're like, oh, this, you know, this guy is not a, not a threat.

I don't have to worry about him. Oh my God. That's so petty. I love it. And so one of the things I do study is actually how male and female plumage evolves differently in birds and because, you know, we can learn a lot about trying to pick apart these kind of natural versus sexual selection. That's what we call selection due to, you know, getting more mating, for example.

And so, you know, I think in birds that all they have to really show off is their plumage or their song. So, you know, some birds might have a fancy song, some birds might have fancy plumage. So that's how they can show a mate that they are worthy of being their mate. Whether that's kind of a one-off has happened sometimes, you know, some, in some places actually all of the males with very fancy plumages will get together in what's called a lek and they'll all show off at the same time. And the female will come and basically be able to compare them all.

Very nice selection. I'm going to start on the sand. And be like, hmm, which one do I like better? Oh, I think I'll go with this one. There's actually this really awesome species bird called cock of the rock. Oh my God. That's literally their name. Are you serious?

I'm serious. Are they British? Well, the person who described them were probably British. That's British. That sounds the most British thing I've ever heard. Did I research who named this bird cock of the rock? I sure did. And it appears to have been an explorer and biologist named Sir Joshua Wilson.

But I looked up and down the internet friends and I swear this is the only detail I can find out about the man. So you know what, you never know what your big hit in life might be. Now for Sir Joshua, it was cock of the rock, which by the way, if no one is using that as their morning show DJ name at a classic rock station in New Jersey, please go for it. I'm not saying rock a doodle-doo. Anyway, these cock of the rocks are a show stopping orange.

Allison explains. They're these bright orange birds and the males will actually, they live in the rainforest in South America and males will fight over patches of light. So that's instead of having territories, they'll like defend their light patches. And that's because they're all together in the same place. And then when the female comes, they'll all get in their little light patches and kind of jump around and try and get hurt to choose them. Oh my God, like they each have spotlights on them.

Exactly. Cock of the rock. So male birds are sometimes up in treetops, just like having a lady gawk a spotlight moment. How do they get into the treetops? Good question. Flight feathers, of course. So how are birds achieving all of our wildest dreams and soaring through the air so casually?

Well folks, feathers, that's why we're all here. How are these flight feathers working? Yeah. So, okay. So a flight feather, one of the key aspects of a flight feather is that it's asymmetrical. And what does that mean? So if we look at a feather, a flight feather, you'll see, okay, so we've got our central rachis, that central shaft.

The barbs on one side will be shorter than the barbs on the other side. Oh. So think about like seeing a feather. So that's an indicator that the feather that you have is actually a flight feather. And that's because, and the way it works is that when air goes over these feathers and over the wing itself, the distance that it has to travel, wings are not flat. They're kind of concave. The distance it has to travel going over the wing is shorter than it has to travel going

under the wing. And so because of that, air molecules are going to try and fill that pressure differential that it creates. And actually that's going to create lift. And so part of that is actually the structure of these asymmetric feathers. Really? That's really cool. I never knew that they were asymmetrical like that.

And now are those flight feathers, where are flight feathers on the bird? Yeah. So if we think about the wing of a bird, you know, I am extending my arm, but of course this, I have to describe it with words. So the flight, the really important flight feathers are the ones that are extending basically from the wing tip kind of towards as you get closer to the inside of the wing. And so if you're looking at a flying bird, they would be pointed at the tail. Oh, wow.

Yeah. And you know, one thing, those feathers are probably the most constrained of all bird feathers. So you think about, once you start looking at bird wings, you'll start noticing that even though many other parts of the bird will be many different colors, like those feathers are never any other color. And that's because one of the types of pigments that color birds feathers, melanin, melanin is familiar. It's also what colors our hair and our skin.

It's very common throughout the animal kingdom. It also provides strength for feathers. And so you're almost always see flight feathers, they're going to look almost identical. I mean, not completely, but much more than any other feather on the body. And that's because they're, you know, evolved to be so specifically tailored to be able to provide flight. Wow. And are they usually the darker ones on the bird?

Exactly. Yep. So that melanin gives them this kind of blackish brown color. And you know, one kind of way that we know this is so important for providing, you know, structure and making feathers stronger is when you see an albino or a leucistic bird. So that's a bird that is missing its melanin. Albino would be no melanin at all in the body. And so, you know, the bird would be completely white and have pink eyes or leucistic means

that part of the plumages had the melanin, you know, whatever's producing the melanin broke. So you would see these kind of random white patches on the bird. And this bird called a frigate bird. So frigate birds are really awesome flyers. They're type of sea birds. They're arguably the best flyers, most maneuverable. They're called the pirates of the sky because they steal fish from other birds.

I'm a pirate. Even washed up on shore, that was an albino frigate bird. So it was completely white and its wing and tail feathers were destroyed. They were really completely like almost all of the barbs were broken off. So this bird probably couldn't even fly anymore. Oh my gosh. So it is really structural. Exactly.

That's so interesting. And what about silent feathers like these owl feathers? Yeah. So owls on so on the part of their wing that would be kind of facing forward when their wing is out. So on the leading edge of the primary feathers and the primary feathers are the ones closer to the wing tips. They actually have a small fringe of little structures.

So they almost look like kind of like very small eyelashes that are lining the front of the feathers that are on the forward facing part of the wing. And that actually is disrupting the airflow, which allows them to fly silently. Have you ever noticed that when you go up to a pigeon and it starts like flapping really fast and makes a bunch of noise? Yeah. They actually try and make themselves louder. Let me hear you make some noise.

So their flight feathers are such that they're actually going to increase the amount of noise. And is that to scare off predation? Probably. Yeah. To like just make themselves more obvi, hey, I'm flying away from you. Yeah. Yeah. And other birds, do you know that other birds can make completely other types of sounds

with their feathers? No. Do you know hummingbirds can sing with their tails? No. Yeah. And they seriously? What does it sound like? It depends on the species.

So it's very species specific. But for example, Anna's hummingbirds, they will fly up really, really high in the air. They do these courtship dives and they'll dive down and they'll go super fast and at the bottom of their dive, they will spread their tail feathers out and they'll make this really loud beeping noise like beep. What? Yeah. Oh my God.

And then the lady's like, oh, okay. Exactly. They'll do this right in front of the female. Okay. Side note, I looked it up and here is the noise of an Anna's hummingbird showing off flying abilities and trying to get laid as described way more tastefully by a vintage Britannica encyclopedia film. The courtship is marked by extraordinary displays by the male who swoops, dashes and soars

high until he is almost out of sight, then dives back down at a speed that may reach 60 miles an hour. This behavior is called a courtship dance in birds and thirstiness or a flex in human primates. When it comes to plumage and colors and displays, what's your favorite? What's the most dazzling? Well, it's hard to argue with the birds of paradise. Oh my God.

Okay. They've got it all. They've got some of the most elaborate plumage out there. You think a peacock's tail is elaborate and it's definitely very elaborate, but kind of the structures that you can see in different species of birds of paradise are more elaborate than I would say any other family of birds out there. These are birds that only live on New Guinea and one cool thing is that as elaborate as their plumages, they have equally elaborate dances to go along with them.

So they're not only like, they don't just have this plumage, but they have very specific ways that they show it off. Magic. Magic. There's this one species that almost does like a little ballet dance where it actually dances like under the female and it will show off in intervals like it has this kind of shield on its breast and it'll like the female will be looking down from above and it'll flash it to her.

That's amazing. Yeah. And that's just one species. They're just amazing. There's a really good documentary that the Cornell Lab of Anthology and National Geographic put together that I highly recommend. Okay. It's really fun.

What about, do you have a collection of feathers? If you see them, do you pick them up or is that disgusting? Are they full of mites? Well, that's actually a great question and one thing I'd like to tell all the listeners out there is technically it's illegal to pick up feathers off the ground. What? Yes. What if it's on your property?

It doesn't matter. Really? Yeah. So there's this law called the International Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Okay. In 1918 was the year it was founded and basically it says that possession of any part of a migratory bird is illegal because they don't know if that came from a feather you found off the ground or a living bird feather.

So as a museum scientist, I do collect these things. So I have a special permit that will allow me to pick these things up and also dead birds because we're a museum. We're into that sort of thing and bring them into the collection. And so do you take them and then sort of know where you found them and when and what it might be? Yeah. So I usually won't pick up single feathers.

It's much more interesting and I'm used to me if I have the whole bird so I find a dead bird for example. Do you have gloves in your car? Purell? What? Baggies. I mean, you're talking to someone, I have a couple of dead birds in my freezer right now and I don't know if that's illegal, but...

You should bring them in. I know. You can take them here in the museum. I got to make sure that I'm not going to get imprisoned. It'll be okay. So if someone finds a dead bird, can they call up a museum and say, hey, I've got a dead bird? Yeah, please do. Call up your local museum.

You know, that's one of the main ways we're growing our collection these days is people are bringing, you know, give us dead or let us know about dead birds and then we arrange pickup of the dead bird. Yeah. And we build our collection by 300, 400 birds that every year that way either by people bringing them in or wildlife rehabilitators, but the key is just noting the date and where you found it. Okay.

Without those two pieces of information, unfortunately the bird will be of much less use for research. Right. I don't know why, but at some point I started to look up, can you eat feathers and some birds like a grebe can eat their own feathers to line their stomachs, which protects them from getting internally shanked by fish spines. They eat their own feathers on purpose, but as human people, it won't do much for us to chow down on down until recently. Some researchers were trying to figure out what to do with the feather waste from poultry

farms. And it turns out when the little handy acid hydrolysis and then adjusting the pH to neutral, feathers can be dried and powdered and they're like 90% protein. Now, there was one 2018 study published in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, I thumb through those all the time. And researchers found that feather keratin protein from chicken feathers helped participants put on more lean body mass than dairy protein did. Now, did the feather protein have a waxy texture in the mouth?

Yes. Did some participants like that? They sure did. And really, is it any weirder to eat melted feathers than it is to drink from the teat of a cow? I mean, shake a tail feather, more like tail feather shake. Oh, speaking of question about peacock feathers, how do they fly with those ding-dang tails? Well, they don't fly well.

So that's actually, you know, there are a lot of birds that have really long tails and oftentimes it's actually kind of a handicap for males. So it's like, oh, if a male can actually survive and do well with the super long tail that like prohibits it from being good at flying, then probably it's a pretty healthy bird. And that's, you know, I want to actually pass those genes on to my offspring. So that's actually, you know, how these crazy tails have evolved. It's what we call runaway sexual selection where females will choose a trait and then, you know, it'll become more and more elaborate over time.

Are you guilty of a term pickup artists call peacocking? Well, that is also known as runaway sexual selection because it makes people want to run away from you. Now what about different color plumages? Like what, what range are we talking? Like can they go everything from like opalescent to obviously black? Like what colors have you seen working in feathers? Oh, that's a great question.

So one of my favorite topics, bird colors. Birds can come in every color of the rainbow, including colors that we can't see. Really? Yes. Did you know that birds, other birds can see colors that we can't see. So birds can actually see ultraviolet colors. So they can. So we can see, if you think about what is color, it's actually wavelengths of light that are,

we have cone cells in our eye that will, you know, be activated or not by certain wavelengths and that gets translated into our brain as a color. So think, so think about humans. There's a lot of variation in terms of what color people can see. There's, you know, colorblind people, for example. So we have three types of cones in our eyes that can see from about 400 to 700 nanometers. But birds actually have four types of cones in their eyes. So they have a whole nother kind of cone and that cone resides from about 300 to 400 nanometers.

So they can actually see from 300 to 700 nanometers. So there could be disco birds out there that we have no idea about? There could be. I actually, you know, I brought a few birds out here with me and one of the birds that I brought was this bird called a palm tannager. So tannagers are the kind of special family that I study a lot of. So this bird, you look at it, it looks, you know, pretty kind of grayish, yellowish, not that exciting.

It's actually related to a whole bunch of extremely colorful tannagers, just Google Tangara tannagers and you'll see these like amazing plumages and people like, why is it in this genus? It's kind of drab looking. It's not that exciting. But if you actually look at this plumage using what's called a reflectance spectrophotometer, which is a machine that we use to actually objectively measure how much light is coming off of feathers at certain wavelengths, you can see that almost all of the reflectance

is in the ultraviolet. Really? So this bird would be much, much brighter to a bird than it is to us. So it looks kind of like an olive color, like an army green grayish color, but it might be just a holographic disco bird. I mean, probably not holographic disco bird, but it would be quite a bit brighter. Do you think it would be in the green area, like greenish? So UV is much more like purple-ish.

Okay. Yeah. I mean, it's hard to, it's hard to save. It's like, we can't see it. We can't see it. And it's, you know, it's not even that we can't see UV colors. It's that with this whole extra type of cone, it's like there's a whole other dimension of color that birds can see that we're missing.

Wow. So Allison says she gets asked a lot about her favorite bird feathers and one that she loves is a fruit eater from Africa called a taraco. Now, taracos are about the size of a parrot, but are not parrots, but they have a deep green, olive-y plumage with red underneath their wings, and we might be like, green bird, so what? How dare us? So their green color is super, super special to plumeologists.

Like if feather experts were your friend who collects vinyl, taracos would be like a platinum addition signed copy. Why the fuss? So most green in birds is made by blue feather structure plus yellow pigments. And so if you think about like mixing finger paints together, blue and yellow, what is the equal equals green? But these birds actually have a true green pigment. And it's a copper-based pigment, and it was the first pigment to be described in birds,

but it's the one that we know some of the least about. So someone's got to get on that. Exactly. You know, one of the things that I love about our museum collection here is we actually have a lot of East African birds. We have almost all taracos represented. Why in some regions of the world are birds more drab and why in other areas they're flashy? Yeah, that's a great question.

So for the most part, birds are more brightly colored in the tropics. And so there have been a lot of hypotheses proposed as to why that is. I mean, think about it, just think about the environment that birds are living in. For one, there's generally, there's more food year-round there. A lot of birds there don't migrate, so they don't have to worry about this really expensive migration, which happens, you know, once a year. And also one thing to keep about, I was going to save this for the flim-flam question, but I will debunk the flim-flam now, is that when you see a bird that's really brightly colored

like a parrot, for example, you have to think about where it's coming from. And actually these bright, you know, bright, a bright green parrot, we think of it as being bright, but it's actually very cryptic in the habitat that it's from. And so, you know, if you ever try and find a parrot in a green tree, you'll very quickly understand that these birds are actually super hard to see. And so, you know, if you ever go birding in the tropics, you'll actually find it's very difficult to see many birds. And it's because, you know, there's this great variety of habitats and light environments.

And there's, you know, that makes it really hard to see all these birds. There are some flocks of parrots in LA. Yes. Do you ever get to see them? Oh, yeah. We see them almost every day. You know, there's the yellow chevron parakeets will, you know, come and feed in some of our trees here at the museum.

Is it true or false that some of those parrots, the green parrots, were like a pet store fire in Burbank? Have you heard that hypothesis? I have heard that urban legend. Probably there's a grain of truth there. I mean, the truth is that so we've got 10 to 12 species of parrot here in LA that are now what we call naturalized, which means they're breeding. And so, all of these birds came from the pet trade.

Parrots by the by are from tropical and subtropical regions. So like, not Southern California. From elsewhere, these stunning beauties arrived here on the hopes they'd make someone a book, but they ended up breaking free of the system and then just bubbling about, kind of aimless. Just like most of us LA transplants. And you know, it's probably a combination of pets getting away, you know, potentially shipments of birds getting loose. It makes sense that if you have like a small flock, for example, it'd be more likely that

they would become established. And so, you know, a pet store fire could have had something to do with it, but probably not everything. Okay. Yeah. I told Allison that I see some in my neighborhood when I go for walks, which lately have been more frequent. So yeah, the red crown parrots up there.

Yes. I think that's what we, I think that's what I see. And I heard them at night just, oh yeah, they're so loud and I couldn't, I was like, what animal was that? And I realized later that it was a parrot back. I get so excited when I see them. It's like, well, I know it's fun to, I love seeing the flocks of parrots and you know, they're very apparent when they're coming because they're so loud.

I know. How come there aren't more blue birds that would blend in with the sky? Oh, good question. So part of that has to do with how blue is made. So let's circle back to that point that I was making earlier about how bird colors are made. So there are two main ways that birds can make colors. I mean, not just, there are only two ways that birds can make colors.

One is by refracting color off of the structure of their feathers. So that means when light comes in, it's, you know, reflected at a certain wavelengths might be reflected based on how the feather nanostructures, how the feather molecules are shaped. And the other is based on pigments that absorb certain wavelengths of color. Oh, okay. Okay. So color can be straight up pigment or structural. Got it.

So, you know, we talked about melanin, so browns and blacks, those are all melanin molecules. So that's, you know, melanin is a pigment that absorbs almost all wavelengths of light. There's a pigment called carotenoids, which is the other most common bird pigment. So this is, produces almost all oranges, yellows and reds and birds, but blue and birds is not produced by pigment. It's produced by the feather structure. Oh, okay. Yeah.

And so, you know, you might be, might be harder to evolve a blue feather structure, for example. That's kind of the evolution of these coloration mechanisms. It's something that's some, you know, somewhat new and kind of up and coming in the field. Oh, that's so interesting. I never knew that. Okay. So I look this up and it's almost like there's a spongy layer made of keratin and air that sits on top of a melanin layer.

And it's the structure of that sponge that throws light in the blue range back. Now, iridescent colors have a few layers of melanin that scatter light depending on your angle to the sun and the feather. Now, all of this is happening deep in the teeny barbs and barbules to make up birds in all shapes and sizes and degrees of flamboyance. What about head crests? Is that mostly just display? Yeah.

So there are certain regions of the bird that, you know, we might often see more colorful and crests are one way that birds can use for display and for social signaling. And one kind of convenient thing for birds about crests and head in these crest colors is that they can show them off when they want to or they can hide them when they don't. They can show up. Yeah. And just have it up. Exactly.

So when they, you know, want to show off to, you know, their lady or their, you know, their guy, depending, you know, because sexual selection works both ways. It's not just females, you know, trying to get males, males trying to get females too. But, you know, when there's maybe they're foraging and they don't want to be attracting a predator, they can put down their crest and make themselves less conspicuous. That's genius. I never realized that. Yeah.

You know the ultimate crest? Huh. This bird called a monarch flycatcher. What is it? Flycatcher is a bird. It's an insectivorous bird. But it literally, the crest looks like a crown. It's called a monarch because it looks like a crown.

It's this bright orange and blue. I highly recommend googling that. Dr. Schultz, because she is awesome, emailed me after our chat to let me know that she meant to say royal flycatcher, not a monarch flycatcher. Now she also attached a picture of a royal flycatcher and y'all, imagine if on your face you grew like a traffic cone orange polka dotted fan, just a fan right between your eyes. It's spunky.

It's bold. Now in the photo she sent, the bird's mouth is just slightly open and the quarters look kind of raised in an expression that reads, I know, right? That's really cool. Now I will now change the subject to bird legs. Owl legs. So hairy. Who knew?

Does it ever, does it ever freak you out that owls have such long legs that they're discovered in furry pantalons? That's good. Yeah. So that's another, you're full of great questions. I'm so, I'm peppering you with so many. This is such a barrage. This is good.

Yeah. So first of all, actually a lot of birds do have much longer legs than you think they are. They're just covered. They're, they kind of will hold them close to their body cavity so you don't realize just how long bird legs are. And furry, I think furry owl legs are so cool. God, they're so cute.

Yeah. They're very cute. So weird. Yeah. So, you know, probably has something to do with both thermoregulation, you know, actually owls aren't the only ones that have furry legs. There are a lot of birds that live on ice and snow like these birds called ptarmigans also have furry, furry legs and furry feet.

So keep them warm. Not all owls have furry legs, only some of them. Do you sign important paperwork with a quill pen? I don't, but I should. Yeah, you should. That's a great idea. I like it. Yes, there are many, many YouTube videos that can usher you down a rabbit hole of making

your own authentic goose quill ink pen and they involve baking the quill in a skillet of hot sand to cure it and then slicing it at a precise angle. And I watched several with just wrapped curiosity and then I saw them use the quill to write and they can write like one splotchy word before having to re-dip it. And I was like, fuck this, dude, uniball gel pens and indoor plumbing forever. Antibiotics, I'm good with modern times, thanks. So yeah, quill pens can hold much ink, but what about the feather barbs? What can those things stop up?

Can I just tell you a quick feather fact that's super cool? Oh, yes. This really unknown, but really cool species of bird called a sandgrouse. So there's the species that lives in the desert. And actually the adult birds have very specialized belly feathers that hold water. And so they'll fly for like kilometers every day to the watering hole and soak their bellies and then fly back to their baby birds and bring them back these like, you know, water so they can drink it.

So they actually like, you know, drink the water from the belly of the adult bird. Oh, that's the cutest thing. And they're these really cool looking like spirally feathers if you look at them under a microscope. Okay. Yes. So I look these up and instead of straight barbs, they're helical, kind of like a curly ribbon on some festive gift wrap, just slurping up water for the babies.

So next time you're in the kitchen, just like dunk your perm in a two liter of Mountain Dew, suck it dry back at your desk, which is now a card table in the garage. Now we're about to get to Patreon questions. So many good ones. But before we do each week, we donate to a charity of theologist choosing. And this week, Allison chose the Ornithological Council, which is at birdnet.org slash OC. Now they do a lot of great work to connect ornithologists to the public, including with policymakers.

They provide timely information about birds to help ensure scientifically based decisions and management actions. They were also very helpful for all things permit related, she says. So a donation went to them and that was made possible by sponsors of the show, which you may hear about now. Okay. And now back to the feather questions that tickle your curiosity. Allison Turry wants to know, do feathers really carry diseases?

Birds do carry diseases and certainly contact is one of the ways that diseases get carried. So just like we carry diseases on our hands, I mean birds carry, well they'll carry diseases on their feathers as well. Yep, we recorded this in late February before COVID-19 had really started to hit its global stride before we all began to diligently milk our thumbs in a sudsy panic. Milk your thumbs. Now birds also have parasites, they'll have lice, for example, and those can carry diseases. So it is true.

I wouldn't, you know, thinking about like you find a feather on a ground, I'm not super worried about getting a disease from that because most diseases from birds don't jump to humans, although that's not necessarily true. West Nile virus, for example, maybe you don't pick up a dead crow that you see. Okay. Unless you're a museum person, yes. If you find a feather and though it's illegal to take it home with you, if you were to say spray it with like an alcohol solution, would that be okay?

You know, if a feather's been on the ground for a while, most parasites will disperse very quickly. Okay. Once they're not attached to like a living host anymore, they're like, there's no more food. Okay. I want to leave. And a lot of diseases also will disperse pretty quickly.

So you should probably know what you're going to die from, of all the things. Now the folks who asked that by the by were Melissa Vono, James Huffstetler, Alison Torrey, Jessica Chamberlain, Kira Gowan, and Jesse Dragon. And yes, I checked that out and I didn't know that West Nile virus is a mosquito transmitted disease that has corvids as a reservoir. That was news to me. Also, let's just make a pact right now. Let's not pick up too much dead stuff right now.

Let's keep our hands clean, learn a lot of valuable lessons these days. Nobody poach any pangolins. All right. Agreed? Appreciate it. Tanesha Brno wants to know, first time question asked her by the way, why do birds grow feathers as opposed to fur or hair? That's a great question.

And that's, you know, due to evolutionary history. So, hair and fur evolved in the lineage of mammals, which of course branched off from, you know, the relative, the common relative of both birds and mammals long before either hair or feathers existed. So it's, you never know what evolution is going to come up with, but you know, in the case of mammals that came up with fur and in the case of dinosaurs, actually it came up with feathers and these proto feathers before they came, the complex feathers that we know of today.

So just roll of the DNA mutation dice. I would say so. And when Monroe asked, is it true that if eagles or other birds, they're not sure, lose a feather on one wing, they'll lose the equivalent feather on the other side to balance? Generally that's not true. So they'll, they'll grow a new feather in if they lose one feather, but when, when you do see kind of equivalent lost feathers on both sides is when they're actually molting them off.

So, you know, when they're molting, it's all pretty timed. And so they'll lose the same feather kind of on both sides. Oh, okay. Yeah. Are there certain seasons where you're bound to find more feathers on the ground? Oh, yeah, definitely during, I'd say transitional times, you know, a lot of birds will, some birds, molten the fall, some birds molt kind of in the spring before breeding season. Generally you won't find many feathers during the breeding season because birds don't want

to do expensive things like feeding young and molt at the same time. Oh, and by the by, when a feather is molted, how does a new one come in? Well, it grows in as a pin feather or a blood feather and it looks like a spike and it's filled with blood to help it grow. And birds have to nip and preen the keratin sheath off of it as it grows. And also if it breaks off mid growth, it can just spur blood. So bird owners, you got to look out for pokey blood faucet pin feathers as they grow in. So, understandably, pin feathers, a little sore, a little ouchy, birds are like back off.

I'm feeling a little bitchy. I'm imagining it must be a lot like PMS, only without as many snacks or crying at commercials. Is it ever really frustrating for bird watchers to know that like you see a bird and not only do you have to know what the birds plumage looks like, you need to know what both sexes and different times of the year they might have different color, different ages, different ages. Young birds will have different plumage. Goals are the worst.

They've got, well, or the best, I guess, depending on your perspective, they've got different plumages until they're like four years old, basically. So, I think for a beginning birder that would be potentially frustrating, but I think for more experienced birders, it's actually viewed as like one of the cool things. It's a challenge. Like, what is this bird? You're leveling up. Exactly.

Casey, first-time question asked, or wants to know, how do waterproof feathers work primarily on puffins because they are the cutest, but other waterproof birds are good too. So that's true. Yeah. So most feathers on birds are waterproof to some extent. On a feather on bird like a puffin or even a penguin that spends a lot of time, there'll be certain density that's going to make it very difficult for water to go in. So in a bird, kind of on the opposite side of things, a bird called an anhinga, for example,

this is a bird that dives under water that actually has very dense barbs and feather barbules. And so this actually helps them to dive down because they don't have all the air trapped. But because water will get in, then you see them standing with their wings outstretched. And so cormorants will do this sometimes too. And so they're actually drawing themselves. Oh. Yeah.

I was wondering why they don't get chilly. Yeah. They get cold. Well, they probably do get a little bit chilly. But even like these like puffins, for example, that live in cold places or penguins, they've got some of the most numbers of feathers on them. I mean, I think the most is a swan, which I think has looked at up like 25,000 feathers on it.

What? Yeah. The tundra swan, which is crazy. The least number of feathers counted is a ruby-throated hummingbird, which has like 965 or something like that. Wow. So you see there's a huge variation on how many feathers you have. And if you have waterproof feathers and you have this really nice downy layer, then you've

got like a really awesome wetsuit basically. Yeah. So you're going to be fine from cold. And unlike our wetsuits, birds never have to strip it off on the side of Pacific Coast Highway and shake sand out of the crotch. Oh. Robin Kiyun wants to know, what is up with emu feathers and their double feathers? Do emus have double feathers?

Yeah. So the double feathers are feather called after feather. So that's just true of some birds. Some birds have that. And this is especially true of birds that are flightless. So emus, for example, they can't fly, right? Same with cassowaries, kiwis, ostriches. These are all birds called ratites.

Once you lose that flight constraint, your feathers can do a lot more things because they, you know, you don't have to worry about being aerodynamic anymore or having these flight feathers. And they can evolve. You know, a lot of them have lost their hooklets that hook them together, you know. Think about like an emu plumage. They're pretty furry looking. Yeah.

It's kind of like hairy. And so that's just, it's because they don't have to fly anymore. So they can use their feathers for other things. This next question came from patron Katie Coast. How do I feel about feathers in fashion? I think as long as they're ethically sourced feathers, I have no problem with that. So because like birds lose their feathers, you know, once a year or something like that. So they're around.

Yeah. They're around. I don't see anything wrong with using those feathers. I've got some questions, some hot goss. Okay. Tea has been requested to be spilled. Davis Bourne and first time question asker, Chelsea, want to know a little bit about Edwin wrist's great feather heist of 2009 and how you feel about it.

How does the feather community feel about it? Yeah. Well, I'll speak more from the museum community ornithologist community than the feather community. Okay. Quick background. So in 2009, a then 22 year old American floutist posed as a photographer and cased a vault in the London Museum of Natural History, then came back with a suitcase at night and made

off with nearly 300 specimens to sell on the fly fishing black market, then used the money to buy a nice flute. He never even served jail time. He just moved to Germany and now he posts heavy metal flute videos on YouTube under the username heavy metal flute and he goes by Edwin Reinhart, a nom de plume, if you will. He's just living his life like no big deal. So what does Allison think of this caper? You know, it does make me worry as a bird curator, which is, you know, my job.

I worry, you know, is somebody going to come in and try and steal some of my birds to sell in the black market? It's a real fear. You know, museums have some security, but you know, there may be some holes in the security potentially. And so, you know, I think it really was eyeopening to the museum community with just, you know, how vigilant we need to be. And it was honestly, it was a tragedy.

I feel very sad because of it. This 299 birds were stolen from the Trang Museum in the UK. And a lot of these birds are irreplaceable. They're a very rare species, some of them collected by Alfred Russell Wallace, the compatriot of Charles Darwin. And yeah, there are things that we will never be able to get back. So it's just super sad. And they're out there somewhere.

Some of them are, you know, they're sold on the black market for fly tying. Fly tying? Yeah. What a waste. You know what I mean? Yeah. Just. They did recover some of the feathers or some of the birds back, but and some of them, you

know, the tags had been removed. So we didn't know where and when those birds were from. And so if we don't have those data, a specimen becomes virtually useless. Oh, yeah. This is all coming back to me now. And now I'm starting to get very angry. Yeah. The book The Feather Thief by Kirk Johnson, it's really good.

I recommend it. Oh. What a... Wow. That guy, he's going to get surprised they don't tar and feather him. Yeah. That's right. I mean, that would be very, very apt.

Just, yeah. In like, sustainable feathers. P.S. tar and feathering people as a form of ridicule and punishment started at least in the 12th century that long ago. And in the United States, unruly mobs would go around punishing people with it. And as someone who has waxed various parts of her body, I'm going to go on record and say it sounds real awful. And this next question was asked by patron Kelly Brockington.

Do you have any idea, some people are asking, why some folks are allergic to certain feather and down pillows? Different structures. There are, some birds have these feathers called powder down feathers, which are, instead of being molted, they're continuously grown and they actually will like fragment. So they'll produce kind of a white powder. Oh. This is especially true in birds like herons, for example.

And so, yeah, I'd say, you know, most down feather pillows and things are probably from like geese and chickens, but there could be some varieties that maybe have the slightly different feather structure for whatever reason, which could cause that. Have you ever had to pluck a bird, like pluck a goose? Yes. You have? Yeah. What was the deal?

Well, you know, one of the ways that we actually preserve bird specimens here at the museum is we'll skeletonize things. And so, you know, one of the steps of skeletonizing things can be removing the feathers. Now, I saved those feathers because they're useful for research. And, you know, it is what it is. Yeah. Are they hard to pluck? They are.

Some of them. The feathers are really stuck in there. Okay. Yeah. I bet that hurts so much if someone plucks one out of them, right? Well, they're not alive anymore. Well, yeah. But if you were one, let's say.

Oh, yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. I think, you know, I don't think, I mean, certain, you know, especially the flight feathers, for example, and the tail feathers, those are, those can be actually stuck in the bone. You know, if you look at the, some of the bones in an avian wing, they actually have little knobs where the quills hook in. What?

Yeah. All the way through. Well, not through the bone, but like attached to the surface. But like attached to the bone. Yeah. Oh my gosh. I once got a chicken from Trader Joe's, and it still had feathers on its butt. And I had to pluck them before I cooked it.

How'd you feel about that? I was like, I'm not equipped for this. That, and like when you roast like a five pound chicken, it just is a lot like a human infant and it's uncomfortable, you know, but then having to pluck feathers from its butt, only on the butt. Yeah. Okay. Let's see.

Sushi? Seth Sushi, first time question asker wants to know what's the weirdest feather? Oh, the weirdest feather. I would, I mean, that's such an interesting question. So there, okay, I'm going to give two examples. One is there's some cool feathers on the bird of paradise that are like totally bizarre, like on the king bird of paradise on their, one of their, above their tail, the feather is super long, rake is, so it's bear, bear, bear, bear until the very end and it has

this little green curly queue. No. It's really cool looking feather. She showed me these later in collections and y'all, they looked like lollipops. Like lollipops made out of iridescent emerald green feathers. It was wild. Oh, those tail feathers are just like, what would be the evolutionary advantage of having a tail feather that is really long with a rosette at the end?

You track more ladies, spread your jeans on. That's the only advantage. Just aesthetics. Yeah, basically. Just, creatures are drawn to aesthetics. It's art. And then other birds of paradise have this fluffy plumage. If you've ever seen a video of Dave and Attenborough being savagely interrupted by a bird, that's

the one. Now, still other birds of paradise are dark and velvety black. We'll talk about those types of feathers in a minute. There's also the king of Saxony bird of paradise that has two long striped feathers on either side of its head, way longer than its body. And then there's a bower bird that looks for that species' molted head feathers and then uses them as a brag to get ladies into his lair. Feathers, man.

It's a whole world. This episode should have been like 10 parts long. There are some other feathers. Another really cool feather is this bird called the club winged mannequin. There's this little bird from the tropics that actually, these mannequins, they'll make sounds, they'll use their flight feathers to sound. And the club winged mannequin, the feather, the shaft part is very thick and kind of dense and heavy because it actually will bang them together to make like a clicking noise.

Ooh. Okay, I look this up. And the Cornell Lab of Ornithology had a video of a little black and white and brown birdie with a russet crown and a little like scarlet pompadour. That, that is a very cute and tiny way to scream. I'm horny. Devin Galdaro wants to know, first time question, Oscar. How is it we can keep feathers we find for years and they don't decompose?

Yeah, that's so, you know, we've got feathers in our collection that are from, well, bird specimens that are over 150 years old. And so the key for keeping a feather in good quality is to keep it out of the light because light can degrade feathers and keep bugs away from it and keep, you know, ideally temperature is controlled too. So if there's no bugs to eat it, if the light is, is away from it, you know, feathers will stay good and stay the same color kind of indefinitely. Ooh, I've, I've illegally picked up feathers from the ground.

I have some sitting in my living room now and I'm like, I found a Cooper talk, striped one in my backyard. Super cool. No, I was thrilled. Just between you and me and nobody's going to go after you. I hope not. I know I've mentioned it publicly. Let me see.

This is so funny. Someone left a, someone left a question about pot and caffeine and procrastination. And I was like, what? And I realized that they put it on the wrong. I was like pot and caffeine. I don't think birds are doing that. Yeah. Let me see.

A lot of people know the birds do get drunk sometimes. Birds get drunk. Yeah. Who does get drunk? No, which birds? So these, you know, one berry, berries will ferment on trees or fruits or they'll fall down and birds will eat them and they'll actually get drunk. They'll have a really hard time flying.

Do you think they do it on purpose? Probably not. Okay. My God. Lena Fay, first-time question asked or wants to know when doing stuff like mating dances, how much fine motor control do birds have over their feathers? Like, can they move clusters or does it just look like it because of all the booty shaking?

That's a good question. So birds do have actually pretty fine control over their feathers, not really over individual feathers, but they can control what are called feather tracks. So feathers don't continuously cover a bird's body. I mean, you know, they, they do when they're all spread out, but the way feathers are grown in specific regions of a bird's body. And so they'll be like these, just like she said, kind of clusters of feathers that they can control all together.

So they can move them around. Oh yeah. Erica, Erica wants to know, are the colored craft feathers real feathers? And what birds do they come from? How do they collect them? Can I dye feathers? All these questions from Erica. Okay.

So they are real feathers. Okay. Um, almost certainly they're chicken feathers. So they come from some farm. I don't know exactly how they harvest them, but, um, almost certainly they're all white feathers when they start. So they're, they are dyed feathers. And you should be able to dye a feather with just most dyes.

Oh, okay. Yeah. And you can blow dry them once they're wet. They'll, you know, have their normal form. I have a feeling you've done this before. Yes, I have. Um, Kendall wants to know, or rather a comment, my chickens are so grumpy when they grow new feathers or when they're in pin feather stage as tweens.

Does it hurt? Why are they so grumpy? Yeah. Well, we don't know a lot exactly about animal pain. I could imagine it's pretty uncomfortable, but think about like how many resources they're putting into growing all of these new feathers. A, it's, you know, it's probably making them tired. B, it's probably not that comfortable because they've got, you know, all of these

little feather shafts kind of growing out of them. And the feathers aren't doing what they normally would in terms of like being, having, helping them do thermal regulation, protecting them from water, from bugs, all these things. And so I would probably be grumpy if I was a bird. Why do some birds lose their feathers or pluck them if they're stressed out? Yeah, that's most often seen in, um, parrots and captivity. Kind of like a neurotic behavior, you know, as humans will do weird things

themselves when they have that. And so plucking feathers is something that the birds can do. Yeah, I'm thinking about, you know, when you get up really close to a makeup mirror and then you're like, Oh, I got one over there. Yeah. And then you start like going for it. And then it's like too much. Yeah.

Okay. Miranda Panda. Great name. Yeah. First time question asker wants to know, which bird has the longest feather recorded? Ooh, that's so long recorded as far as, so in terms of any feather, there are breeds of chicken where they have actually, you know, bred them to have these incredibly long tails.

So I, I don't remember exactly along those. I want to say something like five feet long. There's actually, if you come to the bird display at the LA Natural History Museum, um, we actually have an example of that in our bird diversity hall. There's like this case of like prize winning birds. And so we have a chicken with a really long tail. Can I take a picture of it? Yes.

Okay. Side note, after this interview, we went to the bird hall and I saw this rooster with maybe an eight foot tail. And of course it took a picture. And also some of these long tailed fowl can sport a party in the back up to 14 meters or 45 to 50 feet long. And their breeders have to roost them in these special sleeping arm wares so they don't tangle up at night because they grow like a meter or so a year.

Can you imagine stepping on your own feather tail? I don't even want to think about bird doo doo and a 35 foot long feather train. Speaking of crappy, what's the crappiest thing about feathers? What's the most annoying thing about your job? Ooh, the permits. Really? Yes. What kind of permits do you need?

So to work with birds, we need both state and federal permits. You know, you think about museums as going around and just getting whatever they want, but that's not true at all. You know, we work really hard to determine, you know, what's the minimum number of samples that we would need for something? And then we have to apply to state fish and wildlife agencies and get permission to collect or salvage birds, you know, find them on the ground and also to the federal agencies.

So and importing and export, you know, anytime you want to like ship things to another country, there's forms to fill out, get things, there's forms to fill. So there's just, you know, paperwork is like the least fun part. What about the coolest thing about feathers? Like what's the neatest? Like what just like gets you up in the morning? I just think, you know, thinking about the fact that my job is to understand why birds are the color that they are.

I mean, how cool is that? Right? I mean, just think about colorful birds. Why are birds this incredible rainbow of, you know, iridescent colors, browns, blacks? We just described a new type of plumage called super black plumage, which is like where the way that the barbules are shaped will actually collect more light than just regular feathers. Wow. The barbules, instead of just being flat, they're actually thicker and pointed at about

a 40 degree angle. And that, that angle actually captures more light than just, yeah. Oh, that's amazing. Yeah, it is really velvety. It's so pretty. Okay, side note. If you've ever seen the once blackest human made material dubbed Vantablack, it looks kind of like you're staring into a black hole.

It's just a void of shape or color. Vantablack achieves that hardcore space gothness because these carbon nanotubes capture the light up to 99.65% of it. But last year, some MIT researchers accidentally made something darker. It's 99.995% light absorbing. Now, what about this burb feathers? Same thing, pretty much. So their structure zoomed in through a scanning electron microscope looks like a hairbrush

that kind of nabs light. And researchers a few years ago found that these super black bird feathers can absorb up to 99.95% of light, almost as much as Vantablack. But the coolest part is those birds were like, oh, congrats lab nerds. Guess what? I made almost Vantablack just by hopping around and eating fruit and pooping. Do you have to stop people and say, hold on, I'm just looking at this bird, like when you're out for a walk?

Oh, yeah, yeah, of course, all the time. My husband will tell you, she's like the worst go hiking with because it's like always stopping all the time. Do you tell people you're a plume ologist, plume ologist? I usually say I'm an ornithologist, but I'm a plume ologist in my heart. Yes. I think the more you use it, the more you give permission to other feather experts. Exactly.

You use them at dinner parties. Thank you so much for talking. Yeah, it's been really fun. My pleasure. Yay. So ask smart people, stupid questions. And if you find a feather, just change your name and hide from the feds in a bunker in the woods.

If you're not already in one, am I right? Okay. So to learn more about the Natural History Museum of Valley County, you can visit nhm.org. I love them. And to follow Alison, she is at AJ Schultz 622 on Twitter and her website is alisonschultz.com. And I will link those in the show notes.

More links to videos we talked about and references from each episode and discount codes to the sponsors and to the charity are always up at alleyward.com on each individual episode page. We are at ologies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at alleyward with one L on both. Please find me, be my friend. We have a full page of topics of all the episodes we've ever done. Just go to alleyward.com, click ologies, and you'll see the ologies by topics

all laid out. Send that to friends, say pick a topic. There's going to be some weird shit in here. We also have transcripts of episodes available. We have bleeped episodes. If you want to listen with kids, transcripts were done by Emily White and a team of transcribers from the ologies transcribers group. Huge thank you to them.

If you ever need a transcription for anything, email higheremilywhite at gmail.com, former intern and now paid employee. Caleb Patton is working on the bleeped episodes. Welcome back Caleb. Congratulations on graduating. And thank you to Aaron Talbert for admitting the ologies podcast Facebook group. Thank you to Shannon Feltis and Bonnie Dutch for managing merch, which is available at alleyward.com.

Bonnie and Shannon Side Note host the comedy podcast, You Are That, which is very funny if you want to listen to a new comedy podcast. And thank you to assistant editor and quarantine hunk Jared Sleeper of the mental health podcast, My Good Bad Brain, who also does a weekly livestream with our traumatologist, Dr. Nicholas Barr. There is a link to that in the show notes as well. And of course, to everyone's favorite dino and kitty enthusiast and editor, extraordinaire, Stephen Ray Morris of the Percast and C Jurassic Wright podcast

for stitching these all together each week. Nick Thorburn wrote and performed the theme music also each week. I tell you a secret this week. Okay, the secret is my dog, Grammy. She looks like a tiny raccoon and she has fallen behind on her regular haircuts. She needs to get trimmed like every two to three months because she's like some kind of poodle mutt. But because of isolating, groomers are closed, we're staying in.

And so she was getting a little tangly. So Jared and I decided we're just going to DIY it. And what resulted is a very patchy lion's cut. But you know what? We took a risk. We think she looks even more beautiful than ever. We're in lockdown, cut banks, texture crush, things will grow back. Take a risk.

Why not? Another secret, a little twofer for you, is that I saved all her hair and I put it in a Ziploc bag and I'm hoping to have someone spin yarn out of it. Is that weird? You can tell me. Okay, bye bye. What are birds? We just don't know.