FEATHERS AND
PATTERNS
JACK COHEN
Department of Zoology and Comparative Physiology, The University of
Birmingham, Birmingham, England
I. Introduction
A. The Feather in Historical Perspective
B. Patterns and the Feather .
II. Levels of Pattern
A. The Feather Tracts
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B. The Pterylae
C. The Individual Feather
D. The Keratin Itself
III. Perspectives from Experiment .
A. The Feather Tracts
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B. The Pterylae
C. The Individual Feather
.
D. The Barb-Ridge Pattern .
IV. Pigmentation—General
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A. Totally Pigmented Birds .
B. Partially Pigmented Birds .
C. Unpigmented Birds
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V. Pigmentation of the Individual Feather
VI. Repetition and Register
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VII. Discussion and Conclusions
References
I. Introduction
A. The Feather in Historical Perspective
Feathers have intrigued human beings since man made his first ornament. Birds, next to insects, are the most ubiquitous of wild animals, and
their plumage, although not having the utility of fur, does possess other
attractions.
Any individual feather is a complex structure, indeed, and apart from
classification of feather types little organized work seems to have been
done until the end of the last century. The long paper by Davies (1889)
marks the origin of most of our present ideas of feather structure. The
paper by Strong (1902) was an excellent work on feather pigmentation
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