Feather Facts

Owls have the outer ends of their flight feathers lacking in barbules, i.e.they are unzipped - this makes the edges softer and reduces the noise they make, silent flight helps an owl catch its prey.

In primitive birds the feathers appear to grow at random all over the body, but in most orders the feathers appear in well defined patterns of rows or tracts called pterylae.

The number of feathers a bird has depends very much on its size and where and how it lives, in general a third of a birds feathers are on its head.

The bird with the least feathers is the Ruby Hummingbird Archilochus colubris with only 940 feathers in total

The bird with the most feathers is the Whistling Swan Cygnus columbianus which can have as many as 25,000 during winter.

The longest feathers in the world belong to an ornamental chicken bread in Japan in 1972, this specimen had tail feathers 10.59m or 34.75ft long.

The longest feathers of a wild bird belong to the Crested Argus Pheasant Rheinhartia ocellata which commonly reach lengths of 173cm or 5.7ft

Will there be a quiz?

Hee hee, no quiz professor! But one thing about this made me laugh... The fact that someone developed "chicken bread!" I wonder what that tastes like?

Poor English aside, can you imagine a bird with a tail almost 35 feet long? How would the poor dear preen it? That's rather sad if you ask me...

Holy long feathers Batman!