Why do birds actually have feathers?

It's logical, most will answer: so that they can fly.

Admittedly, that seems obvious, but it is not true.

Although chaffinches and great tits, tawny owls and white-tailed eagles, cranes and common gulls would never take off without feathers, these pretty, sometimes monochromatic, sometimes brightly colored creatures developed for other reasons.

In any case, the conquest of the sky was only at the very end - namely as an unplanned encore.

Kai Spanke

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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To clarify what the feather is all about, let's start with a somewhat unsavory question: Why does our sweat smell?

If it was just water and salt, we wouldn't be able to sniff it out.

The crucial ingredient are so-called proteins, i.e. proteins that the body not only disposes of through the intestines, but also through the skin.

There they are utilized by bacteria, which causes the typical smell.

You know that from the powerful aroma of big cats when they visit the zoo: tigers and lions eat meat that consists largely of protein.

They eat so much of it all the time that they have to get rid of the excess with their excrement.

It smells correspondingly sharp in their enclosures.

protein bomb insect

Now many birds also feed on real protein bombs, such as insects.

However, you can only use a part of this - by the way: - essential substance, for example to produce eggs.

The rest has to get out of the body.

But the droppings of many birds have little or no smell.

And they don't have sweat glands either.

They cool down by panting, ducking into the shade or taking a bath.

The bird disposes of part of the proteins with its uric acid.

The extra smelly sulfur compounds present in the protein migrate to the feathers.

There they create a special effect.

The ornithologist Josef Reichholf says that it is only the sulfur that makes the feather "soft and flexible and yet resistant.

A steel feather of the same size and thickness would break much more easily than a bird's feather."

If the sulfur compounds remained in the animal's body, symptoms of poisoning would occur.

Because birds are warm-blooded, their metabolism is running at full blast all the time.

Their body temperature is more than forty degrees, and the flight consumes so much energy that it shouldn't even exist, given that nature is always trying to be economical.

For this reason, excess protein must be disposed of particularly quickly and efficiently.

With the spring as a landfill, it works super well.

Regularly a new plumage

Birds molt at regular intervals, which means they change their plumage.

Old feathers fall out and new ones grow.

On the one hand, this happens because the plumage is constantly in use and wears out.

On the other hand, intact springs are also shed and replaced.

This is a kind of detoxification cure.

If the moult does not go according to plan, the bird will get sick.

In species that are preparing for a journey to southern Europe or Africa, there is a particularly large excess of protein in the body during the moult.

This is because the bird eats more than usual before take-off in order to store fat, on which it lives during its trip.

With all the gluttony, however, it also absorbs a lot of protein, which has to be excreted quickly through the skin – off to the feathers.

By the way, the feather is made of keratin.

This is the same protein that makes up our hair and fingernails or horses' hoofs.

A whooper swan has more than twenty thousand feathers, mainly because of its long neck, while a tit has about a thousand.

The bird's visible dress is largely composed of contour feathers.

Fine branches spring from its keel, from which even more delicate bow and hooked rays emanate.

Like a zipper, they interlock and form the so-called flag.

Such feathers overlap on the wings of a bird, creating a wing.

Air trapped between the feather and the skin warms the body.

Anyone who has ever made themselves comfortable under a down comforter knows how perfectly it works.