The Wright Brothers studied bird flight before they designed the first airplane. Now modern aircraft fly higher and faster than any bird, yet no manufactured device matches the graceful movements and ...

Charles Darwin once posited that birds might flap their wings to communicate, not just to fly. However, this has always been pretty tricky to test. Now, 150 years later, researchers have discovered ...

Dark feathers may help birds fly more efficiently. They heat up the animals’ wings and the surrounding air, which might help increase airflow over the wing. Svana Rogalla at Ghent University in ...

The flutter of bird wings may seem like a distant, inconsequential background noise, but a recent study from the Yale Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the Peabody Museum of Natural ...

'Directional Velcro' on birds' feathers prevent gaps from forming between them when hit by a gust of wind. Courtesy of Lentink Lab / Stanford University It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s… a bit of both.

The crested pigeon, found in Australia, has a modified wing feather that helps produce an alarm signal sound to warn other birds when there's trouble. Feathers are not just for flight. They keep birds ...

Back in the day, when I hunted ruffed grouse with my father, we often shot at the same bird more than once. That's because we were mediocre marksmen at best, often missing the bird with the first ...

Many animals will sound an alarm to alert other members of their group of impending danger. Now, researchers have shown that crested pigeons do this in a surprisingly non-vocal way. One of their main ...

Pigeons may be considered rats of the sky, but some scientists have found greater value in these urban birds: the blueprint for a new generation of flying machines. Birds can modify the shape of their ...

Birds that molt at the wrong time of the year could be disadvantaged, according to a new study. Birds depend on a full set of feathers for maximum efficiency when flying long distances, but the study ...