The Science of Birds - Feathers: Form and Function

Episode Date: November 12, 2020

SummaryThe feather is one of the most iconic symbols of nature. Feathers are indispensable to birds, serving many critically important functions. In this episode, we explore those functions after looking closely at the anatomy—the structure—of a feather.We discuss the 6 types of feathers: contour feathers, flight feathers, down, semiplumes, bristles, and filoplumes.Some functions we explore are flight, insulation, and camouflage.Links of InterestHairs, feathers and scales have a lot in commonVideo about water repellency in bird feathersVideo of Club-winged Manakin courtship displayLink to this episode on the Science of Birds websiteErrors and ClarificationsError - At 00:44, I used the word ‘historic,’ when I should have said ‘historical.’Error - At 06:13, I goofed on the word ‘stratum,’ saying ‘strateum’ by accident.AttributionsClub-winged Manakin - Recording XC248570 on Xeno CantoClub-winged Manakin - Recording XC248573  on Xeno CantoSupport the show

A feather One of the most familiar and iconic symbols of nature. Like a leaf, a flower, or a butterfly, the image of a feather is imprinted in our minds from a young age. By the time we reach adulthood, however, we might just take feathers for granted. We think we've got them figured out. We know what they look like and what they're for.

They're for the insulation in my puffy winter coat, of course. And they're for fletching arrows and making fishing lures. They're for adorning fancy ladies' hats and for religious ceremonies. And of course, they're for making quill pens. The English word pen itself comes from the old French word for feather. No, no, no. Those are the human uses for feathers, some mostly historic, and they are the least important in the grand scheme of things from the perspective of nature across the eons. Feathers are for birds. Feathers are indispensable to birds, serving many critically important functions.

How birds use their feathers is a big part of what we're talking about today. But first we're going to inspect the structure of feathers, how they're put together. They are such amazing, beautiful, and complex objects. Imagine that one hair on your arm was replaced by a feather. How weird would that be? This large, intricate, plasticy thing growing out of your skin, all colorful and dramatic. it would be hard to ignore or take for granted. You'd probably poke at it and examine its features carefully. Now imagine you're covered in feathers from head to heel. You'd have a thick

multi-layered costume, every piece of which is rooted in your skin. In a bird, it's not unusual for its full set of feathers to weigh two or three times what its entire skeleton weighs. So assuming your skeleton weighs about 25 pounds, which is reasonable, your new plumage, which easily weigh 50 or even 75 pounds. That's a pretty serious outfit. Because feathers are far more complex than mere hair, there is a lot for us to learn about their structure. And they do more than just keep birds warm and make flight possible. Their functions are many. So let's take some time to look closely at feathers. We won't take them for granted. We'll get past the iconic symbol of the feather and study the real biological object, with all its glorious intricacy and its

usefulness to birds. Hello and welcome. This is the Science of Birds. I am your host, Ivan Philipson. The Science of Birds podcast is a lighthearted, guided exploration of bird biology for lifelong learners. This is the first episode where we're getting into the one. wonderful world of plumology, the study of feathers. Today we'll be exploring the form of feathers

and their various functions. At some point, I'll put together other episodes on feathers, on their evolution, how birds care for them, and where their colors come from. All right, let's go ahead with today's episode. The outermost covering on the body of a vertebrate is the epidermis. Fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals are all wrapped in this protective layer. The epidermis protects against scratches and abrasion, the elements, and microorganisms with bad intentions. It also forms a barrier that holds moisture inside the body. New cells form deep in the epidermis and are pushed outward as they age.

Older epidermal cells in our skin form the stratum corneum. This means the layer made of horn. Wait, what now? I ain't got no horn growing out of my epidermis. No, but we have hair and fingernails, which are made of the same stuff as cowhorns, rhino horns, etc. And humans get calluses,

which are sort of little horn-like things projecting from our skin. Other related epidermal structures in mammals include claws, hooves, and the baleen of whales. Scales in reptiles, including those on bird legs and feet, are also epidermal structures. Yes, I lumped birds in with reptiles. Remember that birds are dinosaurs, and of course dinosaurs are reptiles. But birds are still treated by most scientists as belonging to their own class, avies. Maybe someday we'll revise our classification systems, our taxonomies, to more correctly reflect the reptilian nature of birds. One can only dream of such a day. Anywho, I should point out that fish scales are derived from the dermis, a deeper layer of the skin, not the epidermis.

So they don't share the same origin as these other structures we're talking about. Terosaurs, those flying reptiles of the Mesozoic era, had some hair-like and feather-like things decorating their epidermis. It's still uncertain whether those structures shared a common origin with bird feathers. For the record, terosaurs are definitely not the ancestors of birds. They aren't even technically dinosaurs. And finally, we come to bird beaks and feathers. These are yet more creative expressions of the epidermis in the end.

animals. Scientists have shown that feathers, hair, horns, etc., all grow from the same identical embryonic tissue. They are sort of elaborations of the same theme. Feathers are definitely the most elaborate of these elaborations. The raw material that natural selection has molded into all these jazzy skin adornments is keratin. Keratin is a protein that accumulates in the old stratium corneum. Keratin is a polymer. It shares some properties with man-made plastics, which are also polymers.

Take a look at your fingernail, which is made of keratin. Wouldn't you say it's sort of plastic-y? It's waterproof, it's pliable, but maintains its firm shape, and it's difficult to digest. So, don't chew your fingernails, kids. Keratin comes in a couple flavors. Well, not literally, so don't get excited, kids. I mean, there are two main forms of keratin in animals, alpha and beta.

Alpha keratins are present in all vertebrates. This is the sort of keratin protein in hair and other mammalian structures. Beta keratins, however, are found in only reptiles and birds. They form a harder, tougher material than alpha keratins. Beta keratins make reptile claws and scales. the outer layer of turtle shells, bird beaks, and feathers. Okay, now let's take a look at the structure, the architecture of a feather. We're doing this with words rather than images, so I'll do my best to use vivid descriptions.

Luckily, you already know the blueprint of a typical feather. Let's see if we can add some detail to your existing measurements. image. For starters, we have a central shaft that forms the main axis of the feather. The shaft is stiff, but also elastic. It bends when force is applied, but springs back to its original shape when the force is removed. The relatively thick base of the shaft is hollow. This part is called the calamus, and it anchors the feather in the skin of a living bird. The rest of the central shaft is the rakis, R-A-C-H-I-S, RACUS. Unlike the hollow calamus, the racus is solid. It tapers to a fine point at the tip of the feather. Spreading out from both sides of the shaft are the veins,

that's V-A-N-E-S. These are broad, flat structures that form a single, two-dimensional plane. The veins appear to be sort of solid, but you know from experience that they're actually made up of many tiny hair-like structures running in parallel. We call these barbs. They branch off of the shaft and are tightly packed together side by side. Now let's zoom in to look at the microscopic structure of the barbs. We're getting into the territory of stuff you can't see by just holding a feather and staring at it. Here we go.

Zooming in. We see the barbs running parallel to each other, row after row. But now we see that each barb has its own little branches coming off two sides. These are the barbules. Barbes branch off the central shaft and barbules branch off the barbs. Can you picture it? I hope so. Here's where it gets really interesting. Zooming in further,

you can see that each tiny barbule has tintsy-wincey hooks coming off of them at intervals. These hooks, called barbassels or hooklets, grab onto the next barbule over, the one closer to the feather tip. The hooklets function to keep the barbs zipped together nice and tight. In fact, this interlocking mechanism really acts like a zipper. Grappling hooks also come to mind. I've got a feather right here, and when I gently tug on the vein, I can see how the barbs cling together.

But then under enough strain, they suddenly unzip. I can then smooth the barbs back together between my fingertips, letting the hooklets work their magic and, ta-da, the gap is sealed up and the vein is whole again. This is one of the main things birds are doing when they preen. They use their bills or feet to zip together gaps between the barbules of their feathers. So that's how a typical feather is put together. You've got a central shaft which is divided into the calamus and the rachis,

Barbes are branches coming off of the shaft. They form the veins. Each barb has its own central axis with barbules branching off on two sides. And the barbules have hooklets. Crawling around in the branches of this feather forest are some spooky ectoparasites, feather lice, louse flies, and feather mites. Birds have to deal with these creepy crawlies to keep their feathers in good shape. We'll do a whole podcast episode about ectoparasites at some point,

So stay tuned. Feather types can be divided into two broad categories, panaceous and plumulaceous. What we've been looking at so far is the classic panaceous feather. Although plumulaceous feathers have most of the same components we've been talking about, they don't have distinct veins. They're fluffy and mostly shapeless. This is because the barbs and especially the barbules are long and very flexible.

And, importantly, the barbules don't have hooklets. Down feathers are plumulaceous. We'll get to down and the other types of feathers in just a moment. A follicle is the special structure on a bird's skin that produces a feather. These are the bumps you've seen on a raw plucked chicken. Specialized cells in the follicle produce the characteristics. pheritin that fuses together into a feather. Unlike hair follicles in humans, follicles on birds are arranged neatly and regularly across the skin. Feathers in general need to be

in precise locations on a bird's body, so that they overlap just so and serve their various functions effectively. Follicles are grouped into distinct patches called terely. Between these terely are bare patches without follicles and therefore with no feathers. You rarely see these bare patches on a living bird because feathers from the neighboring Teralee cover them up. Depending on the type of bird and its size, it might have a total of only 1,000 feathers on its body or it might have up to 25,000.

Hummingbirds, surprise, surprise are on the low end of this spectrum. Swans are on the high end. All right, as promised, let's move on to the 6.000. types of feathers. Conture feathers are most of what you see on the surface of a bird's body. They give a bird its characteristic shape, its contours. The silhouettes of a naked chicken and a fully feathered chicken are very different, as I think you can picture.

It's contour feathers that fill in the empty spaces to round out and streamline the bird's shape. A typical contour feather has a panaceous part, with veins and all the substructures we've talked about. It may also have a portion near the base that is plumulaceous. I sure like that word, plumelacious. You should try using it to complement your friend sometime. Oh my, you're looking positively plumulacious this evening. See how that goes over. Right, contour feathers. The panaceous portion, the out, portion of these feathers overlap like fish scales or roof shingles. Tiny muscles around the follicle keeps a contour feather in its proper orientation.

These muscles also allow for some control of feather position. Conture feathers can be raised or lowered voluntarily, usually as whole tracks of feathers, not individually. Birds frequently fluff up or compress their plumage to regulate their body temperature. But there are other reasons why they might move their feathers. For example, a bird might raise its contour feathers to make itself look bigger and more menacing to threaten a rival or a predator. Flight feathers are specialized contour feathers of the wing and tail.

They're usually the largest and stiffest feathers on a bird. and they're almost entirely panaceous in structure. The size, stiffness, and shapes of flight feathers all contribute to help a bird overcome gravity and take to the air. Flight feathers of the wing are called remigies. The remedies of the outer wing are called the primaries, and those of the inner wing are called secondaries. Each of these flight feathers has asymmetrical veins.

The vein on the leading edge, facing into the wind, is narrower than the vein on the trailing end. edge. This allows the feather to withstand the force of rushing air during flight. Flight feathers on the tail are called rectrices. They usually have symmetrical veins. They form the lovely fan shape of the tail. The two central rectrices are anchored to the tailbone, which is called the Piga style. Flight feathers on the wing, the Remeges, are connected directly to a bird's arm bones. This differs from other feathers, which are anchored in the skin only. The attachment points of the secondaries to the ulna bone are called

quill knobs. They're visible as little bumps on the bone. Down feathers are hidden beneath a bird's coat of contour feathers, at least in adults. A down feather is entirely plumulacious. It has either a very very very short shaft or none at all. There are several types of down. Nadel down is what many baby birds are born with. It's most obvious in precocial chicks, the ones that are ready to rip as soon as they're born,

like chickens and ducks. You can picture the soft fuzz that covers these little dudes. As these chicks age, contour feathers grow out of the same follicles that produced the natal down. Body down is the typical down of adult bird. A body-down feather grows from a specialized follicle that makes only this type of feather. Then we have powder-down.

These are pretty interesting feathers. A powder-down feather grows continuously throughout a bird's life and is never molted. It breaks apart at the tip, disintegrating into a fine dust of keratin particles. This powdery substance works its way into the entire plumage of a bird. Although ornithologists don't know the function of powder-down, it's likely involved in repelling water or maybe defense against parasites. Only birds of certain families have powder-down feathers. These include pigeons, parrots, herons, and a few others.

So far, we've covered contour feathers, flight feathers, and down. There are three more types of feathers to be aware of. One is the semi-plume. These are something halfway between a down feather and a contour feather. The barbules on a semi-plume feather lack hooklets. So semi-plumes have less structure than contour feathers, but they aren't quite as amorphous as down. Then we have bristles.

These are specialized feathers that look to us more like stiff hairs. Most bristles lack barbs, but some have a few barbs near the base. We see bristles mostly on the heads of birds. Some good examples are the glamorous eyelashes of some hornbills and the secretary bird in Africa. Also, members of the Night Jar family, Capramulgadi, have well-developed bristle feathers surrounding their beaks. And our final feather type is the philaplum, sometimes pronounced phylaplum. These two are hair-like, but they're more slender. Some phila plumes have a tiny tuft of barbs at the tip.

Phila plumes are scattered around the plumage, hidden among the contour feathers. They connect to nerves in the skin and are thought to have a sensory function. Filipulums allow a bird to detect air movements and also movement within their plumage. I'm thinking this is sort of like how I can tell which way the wind is blowing as it moves across my hairy arm. So if you're someone who shaves your arms, that's cool, but you're missing out on some pretty important sensory data regarding your local weather conditions. So there we go, the six feather types. Contour and flight feathers, down, semi-plumes, bristles, and phila plumes.

We haven't really gotten much into the uses of these feathers, their functions. I know the suspense is killing you, so let's get into all that now. Feathers are critically important for flight in birds. The flight feathers form long, broad surfaces that have the physical properties needed to generate lift and thrust. They're lightweight and stiff, but also flexible in just the right way. Contour feathers of the arm are also super important in giving the wing its airfoil shape, like the wing of an airplane. contour feathers smooth a bird's shape to make it more aerodynamic overall. And remember that the rectracies, the tail feathers, are also flight feathers.

The tail itself has a shape that provides lift and maneuverability in flight. We'll do a whole podcast episode on flight in birds at some point. That's a big topic, actually, so I might break it up into multiple episodes. For now, let's move on to the other functions of feathers. Birds are endotherms like us. In other words, they're warm-blooded. So like us, they need to maintain their body temperatures within a narrow range. Most birds have a body temperature around 106 degrees Fahrenheit,

which is 41 degrees Celsius. Pretty toasty. Feathers provide the insulation a bird needs to minimize heat loss in the cold. Down is famous for its outstanding performance as insulation. Other feather types also contribute to temperature regulation. Contour feathers have their fluffy, plumelaceous bases, and they shield a bird's skin from solar radiation. Semiplumes also provide some insulation.

The woolly structure of down is built up from a tangle of long, soft barbules. Within this matrix at the microscopic level, air moves slowly. It gets caught up in all those barbules, so air warmed by a bird's hot little body stays trapped in the down feathers close to the skin. This is how penguins can be comfortable in the frigid waters of Antarctica and how migrating bar-headed geese can fly at 29,000 feet. Well, I assume the penguins are comfortable.

Who knows? Maybe they're bloody miserable. But at least they can survive at those low, low temps and go about their little penguin lives. As far as I know, human engineers still haven't come up with a synthetic insulation that's as lightweight, compressible, and efficient as bird down. I bet they'll figure it out at some point. Until then, there's still a big market for bird down for insulation. There's a problem with this that I should mention.

Some down is plucked from live birds, which is cruel and horrific. This sort of harvest is illegal in the U.S., and in Canada, and most of Europe, but it's legal in many other countries. Some sources say that only 1% of the world's down supply comes from live-plucked birds, but other sources say it's up to 80%. Some companies like IKEA and Patagonia now guarantee that their down does not come from sources that live-pluck birds. It's easy to argue that just about any source of down, live-plucked or not, involves some inherent cruelty.

So, my bird-loving friend, I invite you to give this some thought before buying a down-filled product. But there is one source of down that's delightfully free of cruelty. Common iders are beautiful seafaring ducks of the North Atlantic. Living in that environment, you can imagine they have some pretty hardcore down. Female iders pluck some of their down feathers to line their nests, which is brilliant. They aren't unique in this behavior, since many other water birds also use down in their nests. But Iderdown is extra warm and soft.

For centuries, people in Iceland have been harvesting this Iderdown from nests. But they take the down only after the nests have been abandoned by the birds. The ducks show up year after year to some farms, waddling out of the sea to build their nests. There's a kind of symbiotic relationship between the Iders and their farmers. The humans provide shelter and protection, the ducks provide the fluffy goods. Harvesting and processing Iderdown is quite involved, so it should come as no surprise that it's super expensive. An Iderdown duvet can cost thousands of U.S. dollars.

Feathers provide most birds with a water-resistant, if not waterproof, outer covering. If down acts like a puffy insulating parca, the contour feathers are like a rain jacket, an outer shell.

The microscopic structure of the barbs and barbules in contour feathers give them their water repellent property. Tiny air spaces

between barbs cause water to form spherical beads that just roll off. Like water off a duck's back, right?

In the show notes, I'll link to a nice little YouTube video that shows this. Birds condition their feathers with oil produced by the prine gland, also called the Euripigial gland. This gland sits just above the base of a bird's tail feathers on its back.

A bird runs its bill across the gland to collect some oil, then rubs the oil all over its plumage. The oil is kind of like hair conditioner for feathers. It keeps them in good working order and helps maintain their water repellency. One of the things we love most about bird feathers is how colorful they are. The plumages of countless species are jaw-droppingly gorgeous. They combine colors in ways that even a skilled artist might think would never work together. To some extent, it's just a quirk of biology and evolution that we humans think birds are pretty.

We just like bright colors. Colorful birds aren't meant to make us happy, but they sure do. As I'm sure you know, the vivid colors of bird feathers function as a display to other birds, mostly. Distinct plumage patterns, colorful or not, are useful to birds in species recognition. It's not uncommon for several bird species in a habitat to look pretty similar. It's important for a bird to know which of its neighbors are members of the same species. There are a couple reasons for this. One is that you don't want to waste your precious time and energy courting a member of another species,

trying to win their affection. They're probably going to blow you off and you'll just be left out in the cold. And if you just happen to be successful in mating with another species, well, your hybrid offspring resulting from the mating are likely to kind of suck. They'll have relatively low fitness in terms of natural selection. This is one explanation for plumage differences in closely related bird species that share a habitat. It's also good to know who's a member of your own species because these guys are likely to be your primary competitors for limited resources. They eat the same food as you, they want the same high-quality mates, and they use the same nesting sites.

You need to keep your eye on them. Another species with similar but distinct plumage probably uses different resources, so you can maybe just ignore them. Here's an example. There are two chickadee species that I see in my backyard and nearby woodlands. The black cap chickadee and the chestnut back chickadee. This is an organ in the United States. Superficially, these species look very similar. They have white cheeks, black caps, and throats, and gray bodies.

and wings. But with even a quick observation, we can see that the chestnut-backed chickadee is aptly named. It has a rusty red patch of feathers that wraps around like an adorable little vest. That's the most obvious difference from a human perspective. Even though these birds flit around in the same general area and do cross paths, they forage in different types of trees and have different nesting habitats. When a black cap chickadee sees a chickadee-shaped bird on a nearby branch, It can safely ignore the other bird once it sees that little red vest. Oh, it's just one of those chestnut back jokers. He won't try to steal my girlfriend or my caterpillars.

So, no worries. The most widely understood use of feathers as a display is for mate attraction. We're all familiar with the amazing displays of male peacocks and birds of paradise. So much of the bright coloration we see among male birds is the result of female choice in the process of sexual selection. Different types of feathers have been co-opted for the purpose of mate attraction through sexual selection. Contour feathers that provide a bird's protective outer coat have, in many species, evolved into elaborate and or colorful structures used for display. For example, the Ruff, R-U-F-F, is a large shorebird, a member of the Sandpiper family. It breeds across northern Eurasia.

Males have elongated, conspicuous contour feathers on their necks. They look like they're wearing a ruff. You know those silly white collars that Shakespeare and his buddies wore in Elizabethan times? Male ruffs, the birds, use their extraordinary neck feathers to impress females. Flight feathers of the wing are so important for their primary function that they aren't as frequently modified by sexual selection into weird structures, but they can certainly be colorful for the purposes of mate attraction. Tail feathers, on the other hand, oh boy, are there so many ways these have been shaped

into amazing displays for attracting mates. Turkeys, lyre birds, widow birds, hummingbirds, paradise kingfishers, paradise flycatchers, the scissor-tailed flycatcher, there's a long list of species whose males have long bedazzled tail feathers. I plan to do an entire episode on sexual selection to discuss the fascinating evolutionary dynamics of how such tales and other features came to be in birds. That'll be fun. The displays we've been talking about are visual displays. In general, birds have great eyesight. Listen to episode 7 if you'd like to learn more about that. Birds can see more colors than we can, including some in the ultraviolet end of the spectrum. It seems many males

have patches of feathers that shine brightly in UV light, and this is attractive to females. Some birds also use feathers in auditory displays for mate attraction. Males of some hummingbird species, for example, make display dives directed at a perched female spectator. Air moving fast over the male's tail feathers produces a loud whistling sound at the end of the dive. This is intended to accentuate the impressiveness of the overall display. Sounds produced by feathers this way are called sonations. The club-winged mannequin, Machiopterus Deliciosis, has an amazing display that involves feather sonation. This small egg-shaped bird lives in mossy Andean forests of western Ecuador and Colombia.

The males have a scarlet cap, brownish-red bodies, and black wings. Males display for females by raising their wings over their backs and vibrating them rapidly. And I mean, rapidly. The wings vibrate 107 times every second, which is even faster than a hummingbird flaps its wings in flight. And it gets even cooler. Several of the club-winged mannequins secondary flight feathers on the inner wing have uniquely thickened shafts. While the wing is being vibrated, these club-shaped feathers knock against each other to produce a loud ting sound. Here's what that sounds like.

And here's another recording. I'll link to a short video of this behavior in the show notes. It's amazing, and I think you should check it out. More than 20 other mannequin species make noises with their wings in courtship displays. The club-winged mannequin has just taken this to a fantastic extreme. Being colorful and conspicuous has its advantages, as we've discussed. But many birds use feathers to achieve the opposite effect. They use them for camouflage.

Birds are tasty little bundles of meat that are targeted by many predators. Ground nesting birds, or those that just spend a lot of time, time on the ground are particularly vulnerable. So birds like grouse have plumages that provide remarkable camouflage. And females of many types of birds tend to be less conspicuous and more camouflaged. This makes sense for species where the female is the one who spends most of the time at the nest. Examples of feather patterns and coloration providing excellent camouflage are numerous. Some of the most impressive are found among several families of nocturnal birds. The frog mouths of Southeast Asia and Australia, the potus of the neotropics, and many owls

use their feathers to mimic tree branches or tree bark. All of these birds are active at night and rest on perches during the day. To blend in, they simply sit still, close their enormous eyes, and assume a posture that allows them to look just like a chunk of wood. Birds in these three families are not closely related. Similarities in the appearances and behaviors of frogmouths, potus, and owls are largely the result of convergent evolution. They share a similar need to be camouflaged while sleeping on their daytime roosts. So natural selection has endowed all of them with feathers that look convincingly like tree bark. So there are the main uses of feathers.

Flight, insulation, display, and camouflage. There are a few other, more obscure ways that birds use feathers, but we'll leave those for another day. The basic form of the feather has diversified for millions of years to have many forms and to serve many functions. They are remarkable structures for so many reasons. If it's been a while since you held a feather and looked at it carefully, I encourage you to do that sometime soon. Maybe while the info we've talked about today is still percolating in your brain.

Researching and writing this episode definitely rekindled my appreciation for feathers. I don't want to take them for granted. I want to give feathers and the birds they serve all the attention they deserve. I hope you feel the same. As I mentioned earlier, I have ideas for more episodes on feathers. We covered some good ground today, but there is much more to learn. And speaking of learning, I hope you learned some new things about feathers in this episode. But if you already know all this stuff, hopefully you at least enjoyed the review, as well as my attempts at humor.

Thanks for listening, seriously. Knowing that people like you are finding value in this podcast makes me really happy. Please consider leaving this show a review on Apple Podcasts. Or if you don't use Apple Podcasts, you can leave a review on PodChaser. A positive review from you would be so helpful. And if you have thoughts about the show, shoot me an email. The address is Ivan at Scienceofbirds.com. You can see the show notes for this episode, which is lucky number 13, on the Science

of Birds website, scienceofbirds.com. I'm Ivan Philipson, and I'll talk to you next time. Cheers.