In regular human company, certain subjects — like those usual suspects, politics and religion — are just better left unplumbed. With animal lovers, the minefields are not always quite so clear. Cat ...

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 ...

Charles Darwin once posited that birds might flap their wings to communicate, not just to fly. However, this has always been pretty tricky to test. Now, 150 years later, researchers have discovered ...

Ever since the first humans saw birds gracefully soaring through the sky above their heads, we have been asking two questions: how do they do that, and how can we learn to do that? Centuries of ...

Dark feathers may help birds fly more efficiently. They heat up the animals’ wings and the surrounding air, which might help increase airflow over the wing. Svana Rogalla at Ghent University in ...

The crested pigeon, found in Australia, has a modified wing feather that helps produce an alarm signal sound to warn other birds when there's trouble. Feathers are not just for flight. They keep birds ...

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

Scientists examined hundreds of birds in museum collections and discovered a suite of feather characteristics that all flying birds have in common. These 'rules' provide clues as to how the dinosaur ...

Sometimes, a ruffle of feathers can say more about a bird's situation than its chirps, coos and caws. Take the crested pigeon. Its mere act of taking frantic flight is enough to alert its flock of ...

Birds can fly—at least, most of them can. Flightless birds like penguins and ostriches have evolved lifestyles that don't require flight. However, there's a lot that scientists don't know about how ...