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 ...

CHAGRIN FALLS, Ohio -- Do the birds watch back while we are watching them? Some published studies indicate that is the case, and say the reason the birds are flighty is because they see us much larger ...

Carla Dove and her team at the feather-identification lab at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, study snarge — that's the bird goo that is wiped off an aircraft after it ...

Bird tails tell tales that help us clinch a bird’s identification. The tail’s shape and hues, as well as the way the bird holds its tail, are identifying characteristics. A bird's tail consists of a ...

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 ...

Individual identification is important for both laboratory and pet birds. This column gives instructions for placement of microchips in birds and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of this ...

Research assistant James Whatton confirms the feathers in front of him belong to a gray catbird. Credit: Smithsonian In the hallways of the National Museum of Natural History—past the bathrooms, the ...

When a bird collides with an airplane, determining its species can help prevent future collisions. To do that, scientists need snarge. Roxie Laybourne, an ...

Note to editors: Photos of the Himalayan birds studied by the research team and other associated press materials can be found via Dropbox here (password: feathers). Feathers are a sleek, intricate ...

Some birds are iridescent because of the physical make-up of their feathers, but scientists had never found evidence of this structural color in the group of birds containing ostriches and cassowaries ...

One of the remarkable abilities that birds possess is their ability to regenerate the feathers that they shed. Unlike human ...