A deep dive into the importance of feathers

For birds, feathers are a very big deal. More than any one thing, they are what make a bird a bird.

Most notably, feathers make flight possible. Long feathers help provide the lift and thrust of powered flight and tail feathers add lift and aid in braking, steering and maneuvering.

Feathers protect the bird and help it regulate its body temperature.

Some birds, waterfowl especially, use plucked down feathers to line their nest.

Feathers can also give various social signals. Hummingbirds, snipes, manakins and ducks all use feathers to produce sounds used in courtship or to serve as signals in a flock.

Feathers provide excellent camouflage; the white winter ptarmigan is practically invisible in the snow. A roosting nightjar blends in with dead leaves on a forest floor. Bright green parrots hide out in bright green jungle foliage.

Grebes utilize feathers in a most unusual way, packing their stomach with them to help digest the bony fish they eat.

Some New Guinea songbirds even contain toxic chemicals in their feathers that deter predators from eating them. They just taste too bad.

The feathers on the face of an owl help that wise bird gather sounds to its sensitive ears, helping it in hunting. Many a mouse has been foiled by feathers on an owl.

Made mostly of keratin, the same substance of our fingernails, feathers vary in quantity depending on the bird. A tundra swan has more than 25,000 contour feathers, while a ruby-throated hummingbird has only about 940. A penguin has many feathers, parrots have relatively few.

Finally, birds shed old feathers and replace them with new ones in a process called molting. Some birds do it over a long period while others drop their flight feathers all at once.