Laurie relaxing out in nature (photo courtesy of Laurie Solchenberger)
In this episode, we answer questions like “How do birds stay warm in cold weather?” and “How do birds get their colors?” and learn about how black eye markings on birds help reduce the glare of the sun with our feather expert Laurie Solchenberger, a teacher at Lincoln Elementary School.
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Transcription
Hey, and welcome to Questions Asked by Curious Kids, or QuACK, a podcast made by Southern Wisconsin Bird Alliance. This is a podcast where we gather questions about nature from kids to be answered with a local expert. My name is Mickenzee. I'm an educator and I'll be the host for this series. This episode I'm joined with Laurie Solchenberger, a teacher at Lincoln Elementary School here in Madison and today we're going to be talking about feathers. All right, let's jump in with Laurie.
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Mickenzee: Hey, Laurie, welcome to the show.
Laurie: Hi, Mickenzee. It's so much fun to see you here.
Mickenzee: Yeah, it's so special to have you on. The listeners might not know this, but Laurie is one of the inspirations for this show. She's a teacher at Lincoln Elementary here in Madison, and she gathered questions with her class while they were volunteering for Bird Collision Corps and that's what inspired me to make this show and tackle some of those big questions with some guest experts. And Laurie, you yourself are a bit of an expert on birds. Or at least you're extremely passionate about them.
Laurie: Definitely passionate about birds. Yes. And I have been my whole life. Yeah, my whole life. And that's one reason why I bring them into the classroom. I can't remember a time when I didn't love birds. And my first real memory of a connection with them was with my neighbor. I was three years old. My neighbor built me a bird feeder.
Mickenzee: Wow.
Laurie: Yeah, and I still have it.
Mickenzee: Oh, wow. Yes, that's so special.
Laurie: Pretty cool, yeah. And I spent my whole childhood running around the woods with my cousins, finding things out in the woods, looking at the birds and.
Mickenzee: Yeah. Oh, that's so cool. You know, following that curiosity. And all of our questions today were submitted by the third graders at Lincoln Elementary. Ones that you helped gather.
Laurie: Yes. And they still ask about you. They love listening to the podcast.
Mickenzee: Awesome. So our first question today is how do birds stay warm in cold weather? And I think about this a lot too, especially on really cold days.
Fluffed Northern Cardinal (photo by Arlene Koziol)
Laurie: Yes. Yeah. Birds. You know, we have really cold winters here sometimes in Wisconsin. And so a lot of our birds stay warm using their feathers. And they can use their feathers. Feathers are super important to birds. They can use their feathers in a lot of different ways. One way is they can puff up. They puff up and they'll look like they're getting really chunky. Sometimes kids will say they're so chunky. And I always say think about your jacket. If you have a jacket on and you are just standing with your arms down and your jackets on and you're outside that jacket is trapping all that air inside, and it helps keep you warm. And if you were to push your arms really close to yourself and squish all that air out of your jacket, then you might be a little bit colder.
Mickenzee:Yeah. It's about that hot air staying around your body.
Laurie: Yeah definitely. You know what I just learned recently?
Mickenzee: What's that?
Laurie: Woodpeckers don't have downy feathers.
Mickenzee: Really?
Laurie: Yeah
Mickenzee: I had no idea.
Laurie: I didn't either. So I wonder how do they stay warm?
Mickenzee: Right? Because they’re here in the winter.
Laurie: Yes they are.
Mickenzee: I wonder. And then this student is wondering what are bird wings made of. So you can tell with a bird that there's definitely feathers there on the outside. But I'm wondering if the student is wondering if it is just bones under there. Are there muscles? What else is going on with their wings.
Sandhill Crane with wings spread (photo by Arlene Koziol)
Laurie: Yeah. Well birds are pretty special because many can fly, right? Or many can kind of fly in the water. So yeah, there are bones. Birds' wings and bones are pretty special because they're hollow inside. So that helps the birds save energy. Their bones weigh a little bit less. And so they can save energy when they're flying. And finding food for energy is expensive for birds. And you might say how is that expensive for birds? Well they have to spend time and energy looking for food. So if they can save a little bit of energy by having hollow bones. Right. That's helpful for them.
Mickenzee:Absolutely.
Laurie: But there are muscles in there too. Definitely. Probably some tendons in there that help them fly.
Mickenzee: Right. If you think about flapping your own arms, the types of different muscles and ligaments and tendons that are helping your arms bounce up and down, but birds are even more specialized for doing that because that's their whole thing.
Laurie: Yeah. And you know, you're making me think back to your question about how they stay warm. You know, some birds do migrate, right?
Mickenzee:That's right.
Laurie: And so they do leave and they have to fly a long, long way. And so, yeah, if you were to flap your arms all that time, maybe 2 or 3 days nonstop, I mean, wow, I'd be pretty tired.
Mickenzee: Right.
Laurie: Another way that they do stay warm is they have their feathers we talked about. But like, huddling together, birds that stay will stay in flocks. You sometimes see a large group of birds all sitting kind of close together. And then all of their feathers are helping them all stay warm. Or maybe they'll hide in a little corner. Or if the wind is blowing, maybe they're on the other side of the tree so they're not right in the wind.
Mickenzee: So using their habitat too.
Laurie: Yes, their habitat.
Mickenzee: Definitely. Okay. This is a big question. This student is asking how do birds get their colors?
Laurie: Oh yeah that's a hard question.
Mickenzee: That's a big one.
Laurie: That is. And birds come in a lot of colors. Kind of like people right. We have pigmentation.
Mickenzee: Yeah. And it's the same pigmentations that makes birds their colors as it makes us.
Laurie: Yes. And so I'm going to look. I had to write them down. That pigmentation. We have melanin-
Mickenzee: Right
Laurie: -in our skin. And then we have different types.
Mickenzee: The two types of melanin. The eumelanin and the pheomelanin.
Laurie: Pheomelanin. Yeah. And so the pheomelanin makes the blacks and the browns. And the eumelanin makes the reds and yellows. And I thought that was pretty cool. And carotenoids.
Mickenzee: Yeah.
Laurie: Right. oh boy that took me back because I went to school a long time ago and studied about birds. And we don't think we don't talk a lot about what makes them their different colors. But color is really important to birds. So carotenoids, think about carrots. I love that. Love that. Think about carrots. That also makes yellows oranges and reds. Yeah.
Mickenzee: And then and then there's even trickier colors like blues and iridescence and oh…
Laurie: Right. And some birds have to eat certain foods to have their feathers show different colors. And if they don't eat those foods, then their feathers look different.
Mickenzee: That's so amazing. I wonder what color I would be based on the food I eat.
Laurie: Right?
Mickenzee: Maybe orange? I've been eating a lot of oranges lately.
Laurie: Yeah. Oh, and the birds blue coloration.
Blue Jay with bright blue feathers (photo by Eric Begin)
Mickenzee: Yeah. So blue's a tricky one, because blue, it's not a pigment. Like with the browns and the reds. It's kind of a trick that they're using. So the way that the light is bouncing off of their melanin rods makes us see blue.
Laurie: Isn't that cool?
Mickenzee: Right.
Laurie: Isn't that cool? So I think about the blue jay.
Mickenzee:Yes. Blue Jays
Laurie: Or a Blue Bird maybe.
Mickenzee: Anything blue in nature is usually doing that trick on us.
Laurie: Isn't that amazing?
Mickenzee: Right? Very cool stuff.
Laurie: Yeah. And we have iridescent feathers. Like hummingbirds.
Ruby-throated Hummingbird with shiny iridescent feathers on display (photo by Phil Brown)
Mickenzee: Hummingbirds are a great one to think of that ruby throat. I think of ducks too. A lot of ducks have iridescent feathers. Mallards have an iridescent head.
Laurie: Yeah. Oh yeah. And starlings. Yeah. And so those iridescent feathers can sometimes look like different colors. They can look black or dark blue. They look really shiny, sometimes purple or green.. Yeah. Those are just beautiful.
Mickenzee: Yeah. They're doing that same kind of shimmery trick with the blue. But it depends on the angle you're looking at the feather what color you're seeing. But yeah I think it's so interesting.
Laurie: Yeah. I mean even people think about fancy dresses people wear.
Mickenzee: Yeah. Those can sometimes have the same effect.
Laurie: Yeah. Sometimes they're iridescent or really shiny and they can look blue or purple.
Mickenzee: It's so cool and it's so special too. Our last question is from a student making an observation, which I love these questions. So this student noticed that Cedar Waxwings have a black mask. And they're wondering if that mask reduces the glare from sunlight. Kind of like how a baseball player or football player puts black under their eyes.
Laurie: Yeah. Isn't that incredible? One of the things I love the most about teaching is when questions like this come up. And so usually I always like to ask the kids to do the research. We didn't have time to do the research for that one. But I had to do some research on that one because I thought, I bet that that's why. I bet it does have the same impact as it would for like a football player. And it does.
Mickenzee: Very cool.
Cedar Waxwing pair (photo by Andy Reago & Chrissy McClarren)
Laurie: Yeah. So I found I actually had to do some research, and I had to make sure it was from a good website. So I looked at Cornell University's website. They have a lot of experts about birds there. And somebody studied, I think it was Peregrine falcons. And they learned that birds who lived in sunnier places had a little bit bigger black band near their eyes.. So I would think it was probably the same for Cedar Waxwing. Yeah. Definitely works really similar.
Mickenzee: I believe most birds that have that black mask over their eyes, that's what the purpose of it is for. Yeah, it's to help them out and then that makes me wonder too, do different markings on birds, help them in different ways besides, camouflage which is the main one we think of. Are there other things that the birds have?
Laurie: Right. Birds have. Yeah. And you're right. A lot of times we think that the camouflage is the important one, right? Because they don't want to get eaten by a predator. Yeah. And I always think there is a group of birds called the birds of Paradise. And I don't think we have any of those here in Wisconsin.
Mickenzee: I mostly think of them as tropical. Yeah.
Laurie: Yeah. Yeah. But they're beautiful birds, and their coloration is often used, and they have spectacular feathers, all different shapes. They do these amazing dances with their feathers, and that is all to find a boyfriend or girlfriend.
Mickenzee: Attract a mate.
Laurie: Attract a mate. You got it. Yep. And so that's one other reason to have that coloration in the feathers.
Mickenzee: Yeah. Fancy feathers as a signal. Yeah.
Laurie: Yeah. Oh and it can also signal. This is my territory. This is my home. Stay away.
Mickenzee: Yes. Yeah.
Laurie: So sometimes to male birds or two boy birds will kind of fight using their feathers. And so they might show their feathers to make themselves look really big and tough. To try to intimidate the other ones.
Mickenzee: All right. We learned so much today about feathers and different colors that birds can be. So thank you to the third graders at Lincoln Elementary for submitting your questions. And thank you, Laurie, for coming on and teaching and talking to us.
Laurie: You're welcome. Thanks for having me on today. It was so much fun.
Mickenzee: Of course,
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If you are interested in learning more about feathers or getting involved in our programs, please head to our website swibirds.org and check out the free lessons, games and activities.
There's so many things you can talk about when you talk about feathers, and we have so many different jumping off points to get you started. You can check out events on our event calendar or get yourself involved in citizen science programs. If you have big nature questions that you'd like to have answered, please have a grown up or your teacher submit your question to info@swibirds.org. with the title Questions for QuACK. Make sure to include your grade and the school that you attend, so I can give you a shout out on the show. Thank you for tuning in and I hope you join us next time on QuACK!
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Audio Editing and Transcription by Mickenzee Okon
Logo design by Carolyn Byers and Kaitlin Svabek
Music: “The Forest and the Trees” by Kevin MacLeod
