Feather Functions and Fortunes

There’s more to it than you might think…

Mar 02, 2024

April 15, 1912 - As the Titanic sank, 1524 souls with it, a massive amount of cargo, over $13 million in today’s dollars, sank as well. Among that cargo of silk materials, machinery parts, wine, a car, furniture, potatoes, and many other goods, were over 40 crates of feathers. These feathers carried insurance valued at $2.3 million in today’s dollars. In this era, feathers were valued higher than gold, second only to diamonds!

What sort of feathers and what were they for?

Hold on, hold on. Let’s back up and take a crash course on feathers first.

Harris Hawk, Kestral, and Barn Owl feathers. Photo credit: AbertEssays. Feathers courtesy of HawkQuest.

Feathers are a miracle material that retains heat, repels water, protects from UV light, provides camouflage, and the best part, enables flight. Feathers are made from the protein, keratin, like finger nails, hair, hooves, talons and horns. They are a more efficient covering than fur, scales, or certainly, just skin. Feathers have been found in the fossil records going back over 160 million years. Small song birds can have 1500 to 3000 feathers, the bigger the bird the more feathers, so, eagles and other raptors can have 5000 to 8000 feathers, going up to a swan that has over 25,000 feathers!

Every bird has six unique (and very cool!) types of feathers:

⁃ Flight - These feathers, while a bird has fewer of them than other types, are the lift providers. They attach right to the skeletal system like a hand. Flight feathers are subdivided into primary, secondary, covert categories making up the full shape and extent of the wing. Flight feathers require aerodynamics in the feather shape, so each feather has a shaft with vanes and barbs and barbules that interlock together. Part of a bird’s preening is to reconnect these barbs to keep the wing shape.

⁃ Contour - These cover the bird’s body and provide the bird’s shape. These feathers are connected right to the muscles allowing the birds to move the feathers directly. You might have seen a bird shake out like a dog; this is a rouse, they are controlling all these feathers, setting them back into place.

⁃ Filoplume - These are elongated feathers lay within the contour and flight feathers, however they are not attached to bone or muscle. They have an amazing purpose that is still being studied; these feathers are thought to provide signals and information to the bird regarding flight movement, winds, speeds, and thermals. What an amazing adaptation!

⁃ Down - this is their insulation next to the skin. Down can be poofed up for warmth and laid flat on a warm day.

⁃ Semiplume - lays between the down and the contour to fill out the bird’s shape.

⁃ Bristle - These feathers are very thin and more hair looking. They are located around the bill and face serving to provide information much like a cat’s whiskers do. They can also serve as a facial filter for birds like the woodpecker who create fine sawdust in their pecking.

Feather down from Turkey Vulture feather. Photo credit: Abert Essays. Feather courtesy of HawkQuest.

Each of these feathers has a distinct shape, stiffness, and size in relation to the bird. Down are short and very soft, squiggly vanes while flight feathers are quite stiff in certain birds. Birds had the concept of ‘layering’ down long before mountaineers did! There’s so much more to note about these, but let’s talk about colors now as that gets us back to their value.

Birds worldwide are colored from very bright primary colors, some iridescent hues, to dull browns, grays, and camouflaged. These colors come from a few different sources.

• Melanin - you’ve got it, your dog and cat have it, a cow has it, a fox has it, every mammal derives coloring from melanin. The more melanin in the feather, the darker the color will be. The more melanin in the feather, the stronger the structure of the feather will be. So, many birds who take long migrations have dark feathers. Their feathers need to last the travel season. These dark blacks and grays come from Eumelanin. As the colors turn to dull yellows, reds, and golds, these colors comes from Pheomelanin.

• Carotenoids - this brings out the bright colors. Carotenoids are pigments of yellow, orange, red, and purple and the mixtures there of. Carotenoids require photosynthesis to be made, which means they come from plants, which are eaten by the birds or the birds eating the creatures that eat the plants, bugs and catapillars, for example. The process of pigmentation is quite complex though, but the results are stunning.

Spectacular bird coloring. https://academy.allaboutbirds.org/how-birds-make-colorful-feathers/

• Mating and location - Look to the cardinals, the males are more brightly colored than the females. Male birds of many species display bright colors to attract a mate. Eons of time have created spectacularly colored birds, many concentrated in the tropics. For location, it has been noted that the fewer predators the bird has, the more freedom they have to put on their coats of many colors. Females are often duller and more camouflaged in color for hiding with a nest.

While these colors are enough of a show for our human eyes, the layers of feathers combine to create iridescent feathers that catch light in different directions like a prism or oil slick. The hummingbirds, magpies, starlings, and even vultures have this. Birds have yet an additional element in that their eyesight can see well into the ultraviolet realm. So, how birds see each other, therefore, is different than what we are able to see. Even now, there’s fascinating research going on in understanding this.

Finally, plumage, is how all these feathers and colors are laid out. Flip through an exotic bird book and you’ll see wide varieties of long tails, large plumes on egrets, bright head crests, long ear plumes, and even tail pieces that look like wires extending from the bird ending in swirls of feathers. As the tropics were explored in the 19th century, early naturalists were amazed at the marvels they found and brought back exotic bird skins for science.

This takes us back to the Titanic - What sort of feathers and what were they for?

Ladies hats.

The more elaborate the feathers, the more desired the hat. https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/victorian-hats-birds-feathered-hat-fashion/

The 19th century, as you might recall from my last post, brought a great deal of exploration, discovery, and expansion. What was happening in Colorado was happening worldwide as advancements in transportation made it more feasible to venture further out and bring back discoveries. Naturalists ventured deep into jungles, islands, and unknown rivers and found an amazing assortment of wildlife and were especially captivated by the birds they discovered. Exotic, brightly colored birds were captured, processed for scientific research, and sent back to museums in England, Europe, and the United States.

As mankind tends to do with something that catches the eye, the overpowering desire to possess took hold. Marie Antoinette was first noted to set a jewell encrusted egret plume in her hair. As the Jackie Kennedy of her time, the fashion soon exploded for all women of wealth and means. In the course of 150 years, the demand for brightly colored feathers and full - dead - birds on ladies hats became a $17 million dollar a year industry (nearly a half billion in today’s dollars).

Milliners - hat makers - in Paris, London, New York and other cities created more and more elaborate hats requiring more and more birds. From city streets to the western board walks of Evergreen and Leadville, the ladies all wore hats adorned with feathers. The demand was insatiable. And where there is demand, there is profit and many willing to make their fortune on the latest trends. Shipping routes carried crates of feathers from millions of birds.

As time went on, the populations of these exotic birds began to plummet. Like the beaver and the bison, what was once thought to be be of limitless supply, was nearing extinction. Snowy Egrets in the Florida Everglades were nearly wiped out. Scientists and naturalists raised the alarm, but the world did not listen until the suffragists took up the cause. Women began to recognize the harm that the feathers on their caps were causing. With their newly formed powers of organization for the right to vote, they organized with this cause as well, forming chapters of the Audubon Societies nationwide. They provided educational lectures on the feather trade and created a stigma of cruelty on the wearing of feathers for fashion.

Cover Image of Kathryn Lasky . She’s Wearing a Dead Bird on Her Head! New York: Hyperion Paperbacks for Children, 1997. https://www.mdhistory.org/the-bird-hat-murderous-millinery/

Changing minds. https://www.historytoday.com/archive/history-matters/feather-her-cap

Now, the world took notice as news of the movement spread from media to government. New laws near the start of the 20th century began to prohibit trafficking of feathers. Theodore Roosevelt established the first bird refuge in Florida. These new laws soon spread to international trade, and though the feather industry put up a mighty fight, progress continued. By 1918 the Migratory Bird Treaty Act outlawed all hunting of migratory birds in the United States. Fashion changed simultaneously and feathers on ladies hats became outdated.

To this day, if you find a feather, take a moment to admire it, take some pictures, but no matter how lovely it is, please leave it where you found it, because you cannot prove that you did not kill the bird to obtain it.

The Migratory Bird Act states:
The possession of feathers and other parts of native North American birds without a permit is prohibited by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA). This protects wild birds by preventing their killing by collectors and the commercial trade in their feathers, and extends to all feathers, regardless of how they were obtained. There is no exemption for molted feathers or those taken from road- or window-killed birds. More information on the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and the list of MBTA-protected species can be found here.
https://www.fws.gov/lab/featheratlas/feathers-and-the-law.php

The exceptions to this are for legally hunted waterfowl, indigenous peoples ceremonial use, and those with specific permits to possess feathers. While holding a feather might seem harmless to us today, bear in mind the catastrophic situation that caused these laws to be enacted.

Though this is longer than my normal post, it’s obvious that I have provided only a very abbreviated look at the feathers themselves and the feather fortunes. I highly recommend the book The Feather Thief, by Kirk Wallace Johnson, who focuses on another, more modern obsession with feathers. The link is below in Sources. My other inspiration for this post was a lecture by Dr. Allison Shultz at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science about the current science of feather coloring. The work of Dr. Shultz looks at feathers down to the nano-structures and she has made many fascinating discoveries expanding our understanding of the role of feathers in the natural environment. I have linked to her website below. Finally, many thanks to Kin Quitugua of HawkQuest, Parker, Colorado, for being my mentor and allowing my photography of some of the feathers currently held at HawkQuest, by permit of the US Fish & Wildlife.