Flight feather

“ On the other hand, the truest feathers—that is to say, those which exhibit the essential features of a feather in the most marked manner—are specially connected with the act of flight. The general surface of the body is covered with soft down, among which sprout the delicate plumes that form the common covering for warmth and protection; but only on the wings and tail do those long and stiff quills appear which, after all, are the feathers par excellence, the models and prototypes of all the rest. ”

“ Thus, in flight, the air passes through the wing as it is raised, while in the downstroke the feathers are forced together to form a homogeneous surface.
Birds which fly much have the outer primaries of great length, giving the wing a pointed shape, as in swifts, while in species which fly but little, or frequent thickets, the outer primaries are very short, giving the wing a rounded appearance. ”

“ The importance of the twisted configuration or screw-like form of the wing cannot be over-estimated. That this shape is intimately associated with flight is apparent from the fact that the rowing feathers of the wing of the bird are every one of them distinctly spiral in their nature; in fact, one entire rowing feather is equivalent—morphologically and physiologically—to one entire insect wing. ”

“ The shaft of the feather is split and the web is cut narrow, and tapered off to a point at each end (Fig. 181) . The ends of the feathers are fastened to the stele with whippings of fine sinew, the small end of the feather which, of course, comes at the nock, being often wedged into a slit in the wood (with a special tool to be described below) , or else doubled back over a few turns of the whipping and lashed down with the rest. The small end of the feather is almost always twisted about one turn, evidently to make the arrow revolve in flight, like a rifle ball. ”

“ Pheasants bred simply for stocking purposes are pinioned when small birds, as are wild duck; but this reduces their value when their egg-laying days are numbered. Some keepers cut the flight feathers of one wing, but the birds cannot then fly again until the shortened quills have moulted and new ones have grown. But a bird whose flight feathers have been pulled out in the spring will grow fresh ones by June, when she is turned out of the pen. ”

“ The bird's solution of the problem of flight, which will be discussed separately, is centred in the feather, which forms a coherent vane for striking the air. In Pterodactyl and bat the wing is a web-wing or patagium, and a small web is to be seen on the front side of the bird's wing. But the bird's patagium is unimportant, and the bird's wing is on an evolutionary tack of its own—a fore-limb transformed for bearing the feathers of flight. ”

“ The feather is a very strong formation, not readily damaged, the arch of the shaft resisting pressure, while the web and fine fibres yield without suffering. Being a bad conductor of heat, it preserves the high temperature of the bird, while it is so light as to be easily carried in flight. ”

“ The remaining feathers are also to some extent used in flight, but their main use appears to be to keep the body warm. An eider-down quilt, as everybody knows, is the warmest kind of coverlet; the reason being that the feathers are very bad conductors of heat, and do not, therefore, allow the heat of the body to escape. Birds are the hottest of all animals, which is in part due to their covering of feathers. To understand the structure of a typical feather is perhaps a little difficult ”

“ On no account must you pluck out the tail- or flight-feathers by the root. Flight-feathers plucked out will never grow again; but tail-feathers, though they will grow again, will be defective [177] in two points. [752] First, they will be weak and “withered,” and will probably break: possibly, too, some will not grow at all. Second, during the moult, the hawk will experience great difficulty in casting the re-grown feathers, and you may be constrained to pull them out again, and so on, year by year, your hawk being thus rendered foul and disfigured for ever. ”

“ And then, in the second place, many of these feathers are most useful in flight. Without them, indeed, a bird could not fly at all. If we want to keep a tame bird from escaping, we have only to clip its wings, and then it can no longer raise itself into the air. But it is not only the feathers of the wings that are used in flight; those of the tail are employed as well, for they assist in flight, especially in checking speed, and serve as a rudder, enabling the bird to steer its way through the air.
Now birds are divided into orders and tribes and families, just as the mammals are. ”

“ The shedding of the feathers brings many risks to the birds; but Nature leaves none of her children utterly helpless. The geese at this time cannot fly because their feathers are gone; but they can swim, and so get away from most of their natural enemies. On the other hand, the hawks that hunt by wing, and must have wings always in good feather, or else perish, lose their feathers so slowly that they never feel their loss. It takes a hawk nearly a year to get a complete [Pg 39] change of wing feathers, one or two dropping out from each wing at a time, at long intervals apart. ”

“ With first one foot, then the other, she scratches her head with inconceivable rapidity. Then, getting a little oil from her receptacle, she begins to preen; under the left wing, down each feather, occasionally darting her bill like lightning upon some other feather that appears to her to need attention. Such screwing of the neck, twisting of the body, standing on tiptoes to get to the feathers on her body, such stretching to reach the tips! ”

“ All he can do in flying is to rise to a roof or the limb of a tree. Some other birds have one or two long gay tail plumes which do not hinder their flight.
When the little bird is first hatched it has no feathers. Have you seen the wee chicks, just out of the shell? They are dressed in down. What fluffy balls they are!
Peep into the robin’s nest, and see the nearly naked birds. They have for clothes only a few long hairs. Do not touch them. Do not go when the mother bird is there. But peep in each day, and watch how the feathers grow. Or, you can watch feathers grow on your baby canary. ”

“ She is always very busy, and especially so at the beginning of the winter, for then she has to unpack her great feather bed, and after that is done she spends all of her time shaking it. Indeed she shakes it so much that she wears many holes in it, through which the feathers fly in all directions. ”

“ Let us break ourselves altogether of the feather wearing habit. We shall be more conspicuously consistent as bird protectionists, and we shall not be called upon to settle fine points and follow difficult boundaries. We need not know anything about plumage, and never have to decide whether the wings used by milliners are really those of food birds, or the pinions of song birds disguised with dye. Or if the fearfully manufactured confections are the heads of real Owls and Parrots twisted out of all semblance to nature, or merely compounds of Chicken feathers and celluloid. ”

“ Wings.—Hackled with a light blue feather from the under coverts of a young Grouse wing, taken before the bird is strong on the wing. (The lighter side of the feather towards the head of the fly.) This feather darkens very rapidly on the live bird from August onwards. ”

“ They are placed with wonderful instinct in the part of the plumage and the part of the feather which will most conserve their safety; and they are either glued or fixed by their shape or by their spine in the position in which they shall be hatched. ”

“ The fear of flying feathers is universal among species that are preyed upon by hawks. In [Pg_252] a majority of cases the birds that exhibit terror and fly into cover or sit closely have never actually seen that winged thunderbolt, the peregrine falcon, strike down a duck or pigeon, sending out a small cloud of feathers; or even a harrier or sparrow-hawk pulling out and scattering the feathers of a bird it has captured, but a tradition exists among them that the sight of flying feathers signifies danger to bird life. ”

“ It is plain, I think, that having determined from an avian figure the form of the organs and appendages of the bird in their different modifications, due to conventionalism, we are able to recognize the symbolic forms adopted by ancient artists to represent the feathers of wing, tail, or body. If figures of feathers were so well drawn that we could identify them as such, we would have no difficulty in recognizing a feather when drawn on a fragment of pottery, where no other part of a bird was represented. ”

“ This sort shake their Wings as they fly, and rise commonly in a circular manner in their flight; the Males for the most part rising higher than the Females, and frequently falling and flapping them with their Wings, which produces a noise that one may hear a great way; from whence it happens that their Quill-Feathers are commonly broken or shatter'd. These are almost like the Pigeon call'd the Tumbler; the difference chiefly is, that the Tumbler is something smaller, and in its flight will turn itself backward over its Head. The diversity of colours in the Feathers makes no difference. ”

“ Perhaps it was unkind to bother the poor bird [181] any more, but I meant her no harm and the fever for experiment possessed my blood. I tied some of the straws to a piece of wicking and baited it with feathers, thinking that perhaps she would take the straws for the sake of the feathers and wicking. I also stuffed the hole with horsehair. She did pull at the feather end of the line; I saw the straw jerk, and, when she had left, found a round hole the brave little bird had made right through the middle of the mat of horsehair I had stopped the nest with. ”

“ Without the feathers the wing would be useless as an instrument of flight. The shorter plumes that shield the bases of the long quill feathers are called the coverts, which are found on both the upper and under surfaces of the wing. ”

“ The natural decorative forms of plumage are found mostly in male birds and consist of extraordinary developments of the plumage of the neck and back, where the male birds of some species always have feathers differing in form from the feathers on the same parts of the female. When a feather appendage not common to a species is developed on some varieties, as the crest and beard on fowls and the ruff on pigeons, both sexes have it. ”

“ And when it reaches its full length the animal breaks itself free and swims away, leaving the stem behind.
The rosy feather-star lives in rather deep water, from which it is sometimes brought up by means of the dredge. It can crawl about on the ground by means of its sucker-like feet, and can swim through the water with some little speed. And very often, to save itself trouble, it will cling by means of its rays to a piece of floating wood, and allow itself to be carried for long distances by the waves. ”

“ For the lighter one I recommend the hen pheasant's or brown owl's wing feather, dubbed with hare's ear and yellow silk; for the dark, the tail feather of a partridge, a brown red hackle underneath the wings, and dark orange silk, or a woodcock's feather for wings, and a dark red hackle with dark orange silk,—kills exceedingly well. When the water is low and fine, I consider your chance of killing fish far greater with two, than three of the large spring flies. ”

“ FEATHER (O. Eng. fether, Ger. Feder, from an Indo-European root seen also in Gr. πτερόν, and πέτεσθαι, to fly) , a horny outgrowth of the skin of birds homologous with the scale of the reptile. The body-covering of birds is, without exception, comprised of feathers, and by this character alone birds may be distinguished from all other animals.
The most perfect form of feather is made up of a long, tapering rod, fringed on either side, for the greater part of its length, by a secondary series of slender and tapering rods forming a more or less acute angle with the central axis. ”

“ The tail is very short, and the middle feather the longest: the others on each side shorten gradually, and are of the colour of the rest of the bird, only somewhat darker: the two shortest or outermost feathers arc perfectly white, which the bird has a faculty of flirting out on either side as quick as a flash of lightning, especially when he hears or sees any thing that disturbs him, uttering at the same instant an extreme harsh and loud shriek. ”

“ Powder-down feathers are degenerate down-feathers which appear to secrete a dry, waxy kind of powder. This powder rapidly disintegrates and becomes distributed over the plumage, adding thereto a quite peculiar bloom. In birds of the heron tribe powder-down feathers have reached a high degree of development, forming large patches in the breast and thighs, while in some hawks, and in the parrots, these mysterious feathers are scattered singly over the greater part of the body.
The nature of the covering of nestling birds is of a more complex character than has hitherto been suspected. ”

“ Feathers are important to the bird to fly with; but even for this purpose they are not absolutely necessary. There are forms of animals that fly, as the bat does, with their skin to beat the air. There were once on the earth many more skin-flying animals than there are to-day.
Feathers are modifications of the scarf-skin. Wherever the skin is exposed to sun, wind, or water it is modified in some way to contribute to the well-being of the animal. The many forms of feathers make a most fascinating study. ”