- The feather has a unique anatomy
and this is very different.
This is one of the really key differences in birds.
This is designed for insulation,
it's designed to help them fly.
There's all these different types of feathering.
Here, this particular feather is a flight feather
and we can tell that by the shape of the feather.
This here is the vein, and this is a leading vein.
This here is the trailing vein,
and just this shape like a propellor
is what allows the bird to give flight or take flight.
So when a bird sort of flies, it'll use this wing
and this feather and this motion,
and when it's all feathers are working together
that creates lift from this trailing vein.
So the anatomy of the feather here
is you have this central core called the calamus.
You have this vein here
which is the trailing vein, as I've mentioned,
and the vein is made up of all these sections called barbs
which are all linked together
by tiny little hooks called barbels,
and it creates this kind of solid appearance.
As the bird grooms, it can split open.
So as the feathers get ratty,
they become more and more difficult to keep,
and what the bird does is he just grooms these feathers
and rejoins it all.
When a feather grows, it grows out of a feather follicle,
so birds don't have hair as such.
The feather is like a modified hair,
so it has a blood supply.
So you can see here at the moment, it's hollow.
So when it first grows, it has a blood supply.
It grows out of the follicle surrounded by a sheath
and the blood supply goes up the feather
as the feather develops.
When the feather starts coming out of the sheath,
it looks like a little paintbrush.
As it gets longer and longer,
the blood supply shrinks back into the follicle
and the feather becomes sort of
a kind of like a dead tissue, kind of like hair.
So there's no gonna be no feeling in it
as the feather kind of starts opening up.
So a blood feather is a term which many people hear about,
that's actually a young feather
that still has blood supply going up that central area here.
So it's important when you're wing clipping
or doing anything to a bird,
not to damage to these blood feathers.
They're very delicate, often very soft
as they're still growing, and you can get
a fair bit of bleeding as a result
of those feathers being damaged.
It's interesting to see that inside these feathers,
if you cut them open, it's like almost
the inside of a bamboo, you'll see all these little kind
of chambers walled off and that's developed
as the blood supply gradually shrinks
back into the feather follicle.
You won't get a new feather until the old feather comes out.
If you pluck a feather, and sometimes if a feather's
been severely damaged or if there's a lot of bleeding,
we might, as a medical procedure, pluck a feather.
You always need to be very careful to do that.
It should be done under veterinary supervision
if you've got a damaged feather.
Your new feather will start growing almost immediately.
But while a feather is still in the follicle,
you won't get a new feather growing.
The new feather will grow when the old feather falls out
which happens in most species once a year at molting time,
and that's when the feathers are replenished and renewed.
So if a feather has been damaged any time
after molting and before the next molt
that will stay like that until it's molted
so you can get understanding of what's happened
to that bird across the year by looking at the feather.
So changes in feathers can occur with nutritional problems
and you can see nutritional problems as the feather grows.
Some of those problems can be corrected,
so if you've got very dull and poor quality feathers,
even though the feather doesn't have that blood supply
in it anymore, sometimes with the change of feathers,
you'll get a real glossening and a renewing
of color of feathers.
That's probably a result of improved nutrition,
to say, the preening gland.
So when the feather, when the birds preen,
they have a little preening gland just near their tail base
and that provides nutrition to the feather
and improves the quality of the feather.
So there's things like vitamin D and oils and things
in the preening gland, which helps maintain these feathers
across the course of the year.
Many species or most species actually have a preening gland.
Some don't, but most species have this preening gland
to help them maintain their feathers
and that's definitely affected by nutrition.
So feathers are a good hallmark for nutritional disease,
behavioral disease and things
like the way we keep our birds,
so poor husbandry can be shown up
or can show up in poor quality feathers.
Sometimes I see very oily or greasy looking birds
and this is can be for a number of different reasons.
Maybe we've got too much fat in the diet.
So very high seed diets where the bird is starting to
develop fatty liver disease may result
in excess oils starting to come out in their skin.
Other reasons for very greasy feathers
and oily feathers may be from cosmetics
or makeup or hand cream you might be using.
So you always gotta be very careful of any sort
of product we may put on ourselves
particularly if the bird is getting close to us
and snuggling up to us, or we are doing a lot of petting.
If we have oily substances and stuff
on our fingers or our hands or or
on our face and the bird cuddles up to us, that will rub
off onto our birds and can cause significant feather damage.
Oil on the birds can be irritant
and then they will chew them and scratch them.
That in itself can make them sick
or it can cause skin problems
or issues where the birds scratching
and rubbing and damaging its own feathers and over grooming.
Sometimes I see it with high fruit diets.
I've seen some birds with some horrible sort of feathering
as a result of high fruit diets.
Used to be a problem when feeding ekkies.
A lot of people seem to think
that they require a high fruit content
in their diet and I've seen some some ekkies come
in looking very wet and greasy looking as well, so it can
it's not just fatty foods that can give them that look.
It might be sort of too high fruit in their diet as well.
So even if you're feeding a natural diet
it can still be unbalanced.
So it's important to constantly reassess how
the bird is eating, what sort of food it's eating
and what sort of food we're actually offering them.
And that can be seen in their feather quality
and their feather condition.
Some species of birds, because they're raised
or their natural environment is one of high humidity,
sometimes there is value in providing facilities
for misting their environment.
Some birds will love going into the shower
and often that will create some humidity
that they will enjoy and help them grow their feathers.
Some birds will prefer that rather than actually bathing.
So just having the opportunity
for high humidity can help the birds nourish
and repair feather damage.
Feathers will, once they've grown, and been damaged
they'll remain damaged until a molt.
So if you have had feather damage
and it's just not going away,
as long as it's not getting any worse, it
you may not see an improvement until the molt.
So you may just have to wait until the bird has molted.