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 ...

'Directional Velcro' on birds' feathers prevent gaps from forming between them when hit by a gust of wind. Courtesy of Lentink Lab / Stanford University It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s… a bit of both.

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 ...

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 ...

A Fork-tailed Flycatcher. Credit: Valentina Gómez-Bahamón, Field Museum Bird feathers have many different functions. Softer down keeps a bird warm and stiffer wing feathers are used for flight.

Birds can fly—at least, most of them can. Flightless birds like penguins and ostriches have evolved lifestyles that don't require flight. However, there's a lot that scientists don't know about how ...

Vanya, curator of birds and mammals at the Cornell University Museum of Vertebrates, studies a turkey vulture wing at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. — Photos: BRYAN ANSELM/The New York Times Vanya ...