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

Quick Take Vulturine guinea fowl’s blue and white plumage comes from feather structure, not pigments, creating vivid, long-distance visual signals. Bright colors and high-contrast patterns help birds ...

Each Canada goose that you see flying around in formation around Lancaster County these days has between 20,000 and 25,000 feathers, most hidden from sight. A typical songbird at your backyard feeder ...

Researchers examined dozens of bird species in museum collections looking for differences in the feathers and bodies between birds that can fly and birds that can't. They found that when birds evolve ...

Long before Britain’s National Physical Laboratory first developed a super black coating for its instruments to absorb stray light photons reflected from surfaces, birds invented it through the magic ...