When I was a kid I was always admonished not to feed chicken bones to the family dog. Why is that? Birds have hollow or semi-hollow bones with an internal structure of supporting struts. Physics tells us that a hollow tube is harder to bend or break than a solid tube of the same material […]
Albino birds are not particularly unusual. I’ve seen white robins, jays, crows, peacocks, and others. And of course there are white domestic chickens, ducks, geese, and turkeys. The whole explanation of feather color is fairly complex, but let’s just discuss pigments for the time being. These pigments fall into three main groups –yellow, red, and
Feathers are the defining feature of birds. Everything with feathers is a bird and all birds have feathers, no exception. As we know, down bags and jackets keep us warm, and that’s part of their function on a bird. As bird progenitors, the dinosaurs, evolved a few hundred million years ago, they were also becoming
Feathers Make the Bird Read More »
Here is the long-sought answer to the age-old question “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” : the egg. Eggs have been around since some of the earliest animals – like sponges and jellyfish – evolved, about 600 million years ago. Birds have been around for about 150 million years and chickens perhaps 2000
