Whether they’re opening for takeoff, spreading wide for a lazy soar or flapping to brake for landing, bird wings make flying look almost effortless.

In regular human company, certain subjects — like those usual suspects, politics and religion — are just better left unplumbed. With animal lovers, the minefields are not always quite so clear. Cat ...

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 ...

Ever since the first humans saw birds gracefully soaring through the sky above their heads, we have been asking two questions: how do they do that, and how can we learn to do that? Centuries of ...

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 ...

Scientists examined hundreds of birds in museum collections and discovered a suite of feather characteristics that all flying birds have in common. These 'rules' provide clues as to how the dinosaur ...

A bird fell from the sky and crash-landed in my backyard. In truth, I did not see it happen — I heard it.

A Fork-tailed Flycatcher. Credit: Valentina Gómez-Bahamón, Field Museum Bird feathers have many different functions. Softer down keeps a bird warm and stiffer wing feathers are used for flight.

The structures zipping together the barbs in bird feathers could provide a model for new adhesives and new aerospace materials, according to a new study. Researchers 3D printed models of the ...

Vanya, curator of birds and mammals at the Cornell University Museum of Vertebrates, studies a turkey vulture wing at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. — Photos: BRYAN ANSELM/The New York Times Vanya ...

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 ...