Feather or Not

Psophia Crepitans                                             Thomas Lohr

Balearica Regulorum                                         Thomas Lohr

Are feathers one of the most amazing things or what? The multitude of colors alone makes them worthy of awe, but then there's their structure and the facts that some dinosaurs had them and that different kinds have evolved to serve different functions. There's the wing feather, tail feather, down, contour feather, semiplume, bristle, and filoplume (which work like a mammal's whiskers). They display varying degrees of asymmetry and smoothness. The "branches" that grow off the main "stem" have little hooks that interlock to insulate, waterproof, streamline, camouflage or advertise, and protect their wearers. There is actually a bird that, kind of like a cricket, rubs its feathers together to create a one-note tune (story, lots of links to fantastic sidebars, many of which are interactive): http://biology.allaboutbirds.org/feathers-article/
   This whole inquiry into the subject began when I saw the photographs of Thomas Lohr, who mostly shoots fashion but also takes amazing close-ups of plumage (story, photographs): http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2015/05/beautiful-abstract-bird-plumage-photographs-by-thomas-lohr/