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 ...

The Wright Brothers studied bird flight before they designed the first airplane. Now modern aircraft fly higher and faster than any bird, yet no manufactured device matches the graceful movements and ...

Charles Darwin once posited that birds might flap their wings to communicate, not just to fly. However, this has always been pretty tricky to test. Now, 150 years later, researchers have discovered ...

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 ...

No longer. Vanya and his father, Sievert Rohwer, an influential feather researcher and curator emeritus at the Burke Museum at the University of Washington in Seattle, believe that the tiny filoplume ...

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 ...

The crested pigeon, found in Australia, has a modified wing feather that helps produce an alarm signal sound to warn other birds when there's trouble. Feathers are not just for flight. They keep birds ...

Researchers at Stanford University have been looking into exactly how birds can maintain controlled flight by changing the shape of their wings. For their study, they invented a robot called PigeonBot ...

Migratory birds change how high they fly over deserts and seas. Wing shape, feather color, and heat all play a role in ...

Scientists examined hundreds of birds in museum collections and discovered a suite of feather characteristics that all flying birds have in common. These 'rules' provide clues as to how the dinosaur ...

The bluebirds looked beautiful in their nest in our back yard. They were growing feathers on their wings. The dark blue colors were eye-catching. Our bird house has a door we can open to check on them ...