Robert Walden, age 15, of Cedar City, Utah.‑
What are birds feathers made of?
A feather from the tail of the eagle is like a wide ribbon of stiff brown taffeta. The fathers over the shoulders of the ruffled grouse are like silken scales! banded around with taffy‑brown stripes. A long feather from the peacocks tail is fringed with green and tipped with a huge eye, painted with jewel tone blue and fringed with gold. The little kiwi=s feathers are like long, silken brown hairs and the fancy plumage of the bird of paradise is like ferny foliage.
It takes between 2,000 and 3,000 separate feathers to clothe robin redbreast in his neat plumage and he has more than a dozen different kinds of feather. In the entire bird world there are more than a hundred different types of feather. But all of them are made from the same basic material and all of them grow in more or less the same way.
The feathers of the bird world are closely related to the scales of the lizard world and to the hair and fur of the world of mammals. All of these widely different forms of clothing are made from the same basic material. They are all outgrowths of the skin, dry and lifeless cells like the cells which make the hairs on your head.
Each bird feather grows from a small pit in the skin which is fed by tiny blood vessels. The dry, lifeless cells of the feather material are pushed up as more cells form below them. The shape of the feather, however, depends upon the bird and even upon the part of the bird where it is to do its work.,
The basic material. of all feathers is dry cells of horny skin material, but the colors come from a variety of sources. The glossy black color of the crow, the candy browns of the pheasant and the pearly greys of the pigeon are built into the cells with the growing feather.
They are pigments which come from the bird's blood stream. The red of the cardinal and the golden yellow of the canary are also built‑in colors. They are formed from fatty deposits in the birds body.
The radiant jewel tones of the hummingbirds the rainbow gloss on the neck of the drake and the shimmering colors of the peacock are not pigments built into the feathers: These dazzling, iridescent colors are tricks of bent or refracted light. Tiny ridges in the feathers act like prisms td break up the rays of light and scatter them in rainbow colors.
He may be drab or gaily coloreds but a bird is certainly the most sensibly dressed creature in the entire animal world, He can fluff up his feathers to keep himself warm and smooth them down flat to keep out the summer's heat. His entire wardrobe, summer or winter, weighs next to nothing and the silken feathers all overlap in a smooth slicker to keep out the rain.