Bird's Sense of Touch

We touch with our fingers and skin. Since birds’ skins are covered with feathers, this would seem to limit their sense of touch. But birds have tiny thin almost invisible feathers that likely help a bird be exquisitely sensitive to touch.

This is the best educated guess of the function of a certain type of small feather that grows next to the and underneath the big body and flight feathers that you see on the outside of a bird. They are called filoplumes. They look like very thin hairs with tufts at the end. The shafts are inserted right at the base of the body and flight feathers and into areas rich with sensory receptor nerves.

Here are a couple of ways they would work: If a body feather is out of place, the bird could feel it by the movement of tiny filoplume feathers next to it. The filoplume feathers likely act as levers enhancing the movement of the tip to the nerve-rich cells at the base where the shaft is inserted into the skin. Then the bird could know to ruffle its feathers or groom the out-of-place body feather into place.

And when flying, the filoplumes could, through the nerve receptors at their base right next to each big primary feather, tell the bird to adjust the angle of each feather according to the aerodynamic needs of flight.

*Spring 2020 issue of Living Bird Magazine

Filoplume illustration by Jen Lobo 2020

How Feathers Are The Same As Pine Needles

Feather shafts look kind of like these pine needles where they attach. Both feather and these pine needles move similarly. A biologist friend told me that the name of the pine needle connection is called a fascicular bundle. For a feather it is called the follicle sheath. It is where on a flight feather the skin that goes up the feather shaft like a sock on your leg and similar to the brown part where the pine needles attach.

Thank You Mister Turkey for Your Meat and Your Feathers

I use naturally shed feathers in most of my art, except for turkeys. I usually go to a friend’s little farm to get a turkey for the holidays. This time, she gave me her free-roaming two-year-old male whose feathers were in great beautiful shape. He was a heritage turkey which means he was smaller (14 pounds dressed) and more flavorful than ones selected and modified for quick growth that you get in the supermarket: the big broad-breasted white butterballs.

I tried raising a couple of those one year and became revolted at their quick growth because, if I did not kill and butcher them in 4 months, they literally would have grown too fat to walk.

Missing for 20 years

These three boxes full of feathers languished upstairs in my large barn for 20 years, pretty much forgotten. I rediscovered them last week as I was reorganizing stuff in the barn for a building project. They now hang by the entry to my studio, cleaned up and also reorganized. The feathers, 25 years ago when I assembled the boxes, were carefully selected to be legal to have. Some of them are from exotic pheasants that I had raised and some from aviaries and zoos.