22 Monday Feb 2021
Posted in birds
Where the Mute swans do their grooming and preening, there is always a profusion of white feathers, large and small, stiff and downy. I grabbed this one because I liked the way it showed the constituent parts of the feather.
Rather than repeat what others have so ably published, I thought I’d just post the pretty pictures here and, if you want to learn more, you can check out this particularly good post (with excellent illustrated drawings to aid their explanations) on The Cornell Lab website.
15 Monday Feb 2021
Posted in birds
Pheasant feathers – these long tail feathers, in particular – have long been prized as adornments to fashionable hats, and such feathers are still available in large quantities today, due to the huge numbers of pheasants that are bred and released throughout Britain for the sport of the shooting fraternity. Though there are no pheasant-breeding farms in my local area, these birds can frequently be heard, if not always seen, as soon as I step outside our urban streets.
08 Monday Feb 2021
Posted in birds
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If you think our Magpies are black and white, look again.
01 Monday Feb 2021
Posted in birds
I could easily have overlooked this feather if, at the very moment I glanced down, the sun hadn’t shone through a fleeting break in the dense cloud cover and highlighted the tiny splodge of bright blue on one side below the white.
Once I’d picked up the feather and looked closer, I also noticed the faint blue mottling at the other end of the white patch. That blue is an indisputable identification pointer – this is from a Jay, it’s one of the less vibrant and well marked of its wing feathers.
25 Monday Jan 2021
Posted in birds
Like many people who enjoy walking with nature, I pick up the odd thing that attracts my eye: nuts and cones, galls, pebbles and fossils, skulls (small creatures – I only have a couple). And feathers, some of which I thought I’d share over the coming weeks. From the location where I found these two – under tall trees at Cosmeston Lakes Country Park, and from the markings, I think these are Buzzard feathers.
05 Wednesday Sep 2018
Feather: Noun; any of the flat appendages growing from a bird’s skin and forming its plumage, consisting of a partly hollow horny shaft fringed with vanes of barbs (Oxford Dictionary).
I often come across discarded feathers when I’m out walking and try to guess which birds they’ve come from, though, unless they’re very distinctively patterned, that can be virtually impossible. Sometimes the feather just has to come home with me … like these three below. I think the bottom one’s probably from a Pheasant – not sure about the other two.
