Scott and McFarland, Bird Feathers

We all find feathers in the field, and many of us over the years have picked up little tricks for identifying at least the most obvious of them: that pointed feather with the yellow shaft came from a flicker’s tail, the glossy one with a white zone from a phainopepla’s wing, the complexly patterned purple and bronze from a pheasant’s back. But no one, I’d wager, will come away from a reading of this beautifully produced book without masses of new information—information likely to be of use the very next time you walk out the door.

  Feathers (I don’t think we really need to specify further, the book’s title notwithstanding) begins with a thorough and thoroughly informative introduction to the avian integument, from its possible evolutionary origins to the amazing range of specializations that make feathers just about perfect at everything they do. The introduction is well written and beautifully illustrated; many readers will miss an accompanying glossary (I forgot halfway through what a tegmen was and had to reread nearly the entire section), and more careful copy-editing would have avoided the all too common misspelling of what should be “rectrices.”

Some users may be tempted to skip the introductory sections, but don’t do it. You’ll miss out on such gems as an easy way to distinguish secondaries from rectrices (a bugaboo of mine for decades) or a neat trick to identify anatid flight feathers at a glance. These and many other problems are cleared up by well-written explanations and eloquent illustrations, and careful readers of the introduction will learn things even about those species not included in the systematic section that follows.

The systematic section is not, of course, that great (and unattainable) desideratum of feather finders—an exhaustive synoptic collection of all feathers from all North American species—but it covers nearly 400 taxa, almost all represented by multiple feathers from wing and tail and most by a selection of body feathers, in some cases including even tufts of down. The photographs here would be even more useful were the flight feathers numbered, making it possible for the user to be certain that he or she is not comparing, say, P10 of one species with P8 of a similar species.

Feathers is intended in the first instance to help in the identification of avian membra disjecta, but careful birders will find it useful, too, in getting a clearer sense of how some of the patterns discernible on live birds in the field are created. Compare, for example, the rectrices of Black-billed and Yellow-billed Cuckoos or Ash-throated and Great Crested Flycatchers as illustrated here, or look closely at the blackish patches on the outer vane of a Ruby-crowned Kinglet’s secondaries. There is a great deal of learning and pleasure to be had from this book, an estimable contribution not just to birding but to ornithology, and one that stands head and shoulders—rachis and vanes?—above any other print reference to feather identification.