Find a feather? What bird is it from?
By law you're not supposed to possess feathers from wild birds (in order to protect birds from being hunted for their feathers), but there are a couple of good websites to help with feather identification anyway.
The Fish and Wildlife Service has a website called Feather Atlas that helps you identify feathers based on color, position, pattern, size, and kind of bird.
Featherbase is another website focusing on bird feathers. The site lays out the feathers of a given bird, and arranging them in groups so you can see the variety of feather types that cover a bird's body.
I used this website when I was sculpting an eagle for a monument involving a three-dimensional Marine Corps Eagle, Globe, and Anchor. I printed out the feathers to scale from the archive and used them for the armature, literally making a matching feather armature for each feather (I also used skeletons to scale to build the wire armature in proper proportion)!
ReplyDeleteGreat resource! I also highly recommend the identification app Seek by iNaturalist — it’s not great with feathers (yet), but it does work for so many natural things, including some animal scat and even footprints (if the condition is good enough.)
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