Feather & Bird Encyclopedia
Search and identify feathers by species — with feather type, plumage, colours, size, habitat, and how to tell them apart in the field.
African Spoonbill
An all-white African wading bird with a red face and legs, identified by its plain white plumage and grey spoon-shaped bill without a crest.
wading bird
Sage Thrasher
The smallest and most compact North American thrasher, a streaky gray-brown bird of sagebrush country with a shorter, straighter bill than its relatives.
songbird
Wedge-tailed Eagle
Australia's largest bird of prey, distinguished from all other eagles by its remarkably long, diamond-shaped tail feathers, the longest relative to body size of any eagle.
raptor
Eurasian Hoopoe
An unmistakable bird with a fan-shaped crest and bold black-and-white barred wings, probing the ground with a long curved bill.
other
Sulphur-crested Cockatoo
A large all-white cockatoo with a tall sulphur-yellow crest that fans forward when the bird is alert or excited.
parrot
Metallic Pigeon
The Metallic Pigeon is a dark island pigeon named for the glossy green-and-purple iridescent sheen across its neck feathers, often paired with a contrasting white throat.
dove pigeon
American Robin
The American Robin is a familiar thrush whose warm orange breast feathers and plain gray-brown back feathers make it one of the easiest yard birds to identify from a single dropped feather.
songbird
Taiwan Blue Magpie
Taiwan's national bird, a richly blue-bodied corvid with a black head, red bill, and an exceptionally long tail tipped in white.
corvid
Snail Kite
A marsh-dwelling raptor with a thin, deeply curved bill for extracting apple snails, and feathers ranging from slaty gray in males to warm streaked brown in females and young birds.
raptor
Grey Warbler
The Grey Warbler is one of New Zealand's smallest birds, a plain grey-brown insect-eater best known for its long, trilling song rather than its understated plumage.
songbird
Calliope Hummingbird
The smallest breeding bird in North America, notable for the male's streaked, wine-red gorget that splays outward like tiny rays rather than forming a solid patch.
hummingbird
Common Swift
The Common Swift is an almost entirely aerial bird with long, scythe-like flight feathers and uniformly sooty-brown plumage, built for a life spent on the wing far more than any songbird.
other
Ring-necked Pheasant
A large, long-tailed gamebird whose males carry some of the most vividly iridescent body feathers and dramatically elongated tail feathers of any bird found in open countryside.
gamebird
Indian Peafowl
One of the most recognizable birds in the world, with males displaying an iridescent blue neck and an immense fanning train of elongated feathers marked with large eyespots.
gamebird
Limpkin
A brown, white-spotted wading bird related to both rails and cranes, known for its loud, wailing calls and long, slightly downcurved bill.
wading bird
Grey Heron
A tall, still-hunting wading bird whose pale grey body plumage, black head plumes, and dark flight feathers make it one of the most recognizable large waterbirds in Europe, Asia, and Africa.
wading bird
Rock Pigeon
A stocky, familiar city bird whose feather color is famously variable, though wild-type individuals retain a blue-gray body with two dark wingbars and an iridescent green-purple neck.
dove pigeon
Crested Caracara
A bold, long-legged raptor of southern South America's open grasslands, with a black cap, cream neck, and barred breast that make its feathers unmistakable among ground-foraging birds of prey.
raptor
Common Cuckoo
A slim, hawk-mimicking bird whose barred underparts and pointed wings closely resemble a small sparrowhawk, an example of remarkable plumage convergence in nature.
other
Paradise Tanager
One of the most vividly colored songbirds in the world, the Paradise Tanager combines a turquoise-green head, black back, red rump, and purplish-blue throat in a single small canopy bird.
songbird
Hamerkop
A small brown African wading bird named for its hammer-shaped head, formed by a thick bill and a backward-pointing crest, best known for building enormous domed stick nests.
wading bird
Ruppell's Vulture
A large African vulture best known for its scaly, scalloped-looking plumage created by pale-edged dark brown feathers, and famous for flying at higher altitudes than almost any other bird.
raptor
Wandering Albatross
The largest of all flying birds by wingspan, an immense white seabird of the Southern Ocean whose plumage whitens progressively with age over many years.
seabird
Giant Kingfisher
Africa's largest kingfisher, a bulky black-and-white bird with a shaggy crest, hunting fish along forested rivers and rocky streams.
other