Bird topography

I was musing on the value of learning bird topography this morning, wondering why it is so important to know the greater coverts and supercilium and all the rest. The easy answer is that it gives us a framework to describe the color patterns of birds, but I think there’s even more to it than

The feathers along the side of the lower jaw have a very confusing history of terminology. They’ve been called the malar stripe (in many early and mid 20th century bird books), the submoustachial ((Because this was a British proposal, the spelling is British “moustache” rather than the American “mustache”, and American bird guides have continued

The feathers that grow on the sides of the head above the eyes of a bird are called the supercilium, and when they contrast in color with the adjacent feathers we call that an eyebrow stripe. There’s lots of variation in the shape of the eyebrow stripe, and in some closely-related species this can be

One of the well-defined groups of feathers on the underside of a bird is what we call the breast. In reality, on songbirds these feathers grow from the front of the neck, extending down so that the tips of the feathers (which is all we can see) cover the foreparts of the body – the

Patterns of translucence in wing feathers provide useful identification clues for many species of birds – terns, gulls, hawks, and others. Generally the translucent parts of the wing are those where there are fewer layers of feathers to block the light, and less pigment in the feathers. I’ve written about this before in my book