From the Ostrich, weighing up to 340 pounds, to the Bee Hummingbird, tipping the scales at approximately 2 grams (yes, that’s less than a penny), birds truly define diversity.
Here at the Houston Zoo, we boast ostriches, and our smallest bird is the Star Finch, weighing in at 9 grams, almost two nickels! The variety of birds that can be found on zoo grounds is astounding. Our birds range from all over the globe, eat everything from seeds and nuts to nectar, carrion or fruit, and come in a spectrum of shapes and sizes. Within the Tropical Bird House alone, it is not difficult to list (at least) one bird for every color of the rainbow. Remember Roy G. Biv? Let’s take a look at the rainbow through a Houston Zoo bird filter:
Red:
A Northern Cardinal is as red as you can get!
Orange:
It's in the name! An Orange Bishop.
Yellow:
Yet another bishop, a Yellow-crowned Bishop!
Green:
A beautiful Emerald Starling
Blue:
The Bay-headed Tanager has a brilliant blue belly.
Indigo:
Indigo is a difficult color to capture, unless you're a Gold-breasted Starling.
Violet:
Once again, the name gives it away--a Violet-backed Tanager!
Many of our birds boast numerous colors, as our Hawk-headed Parrots illustrate:
Peanuts are a favorite
To put it simply, birds are amazing animals. The colors alone seal the deal on our fascination. We have feathers to thank for all that beauty and so many gorgeous hues. Feathers not only help insulate and protect the bird’s skin, provide the smooth surface necessary for flight, and show-case colors and patterns important to camouflage and social behavior, but are a marvel of the natural world, the most prominently recognized feature of a bird’s anatomy, and unique to birds alone.
Through a short series of blogs, I hope to show you just how impressive they are, from structure, to shape, color, strength and function. I will be starting from the skin up, describing how birds grow feathers, and what patterns feather growth takes right below the skin.
Until then, I’ll leave you with these amazing feather facts to consider:
The feathers of a bird commonly weigh only 5 to 10 % of a bird’s weight. This is still usually 2 to 3 times heavier than the bird’s bones.
The world’s smallest feathers are from the eyelids of the Bee Hummingbird–1/63 of an inch, while a peacock’s tail feathers are 5 feet long.
The Tundra Swan boasts one of the highest numbers of feathers at 25,216. A vast majority of those feathers were found on the head and neck. Not only that, but someone actually counted them. Feathers are a serious business.
**Photos by Benjamin King and Megan Neal**
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