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 ...

Experts say wing clipping, a common practice in some countries to impair a bird's flying ability, is no longer recommended as ...

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 ...

Feathers define birds. Other critters, like insects, fly; but no other critter wears feathers. And what amazing structures they are, these feathers. They allow birds to fly, perform mating displays, ...

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 ...

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.

He wanted to see how many different avians he could find on people’s hats. He counted 542 hats adorned with parts from 174 different bird species. This wasn’t unusual: 19th-century women were obsessed ...

Birds that molt at the wrong time of the year could be disadvantaged, according to a new study. Birds depend on a full set of feathers for maximum efficiency when flying long distances, but the study ...

For birds, black feathers provide certain flight advantages. That's because black feathers contain more pigment-packed melanosomes than do feathers of other colors, and melanosomes can bind with ...

Birds are famous for strutting their stuff—"proud as a peacock" isn't an empty saying, after all—but sometimes birds need some help getting back in fine feather. So for this Saturday's Weird Animal ...