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In his 1665 book Micrographia, Robert Hooke describes the "fantastical" (structural, not pigment) colours of the Peacock's feathers: [3]. The parts of the Feathers of this glorious Bird appear, through the Microscope, no less gaudy then do the whole Feathers; for, as to the naked eye 'tis evident that the stem or quill of each Feather in the tail sends out multitudes of Lateral branches ...
The brilliant iridescent colors of the peacock's tail feathers are created by structural coloration, as first noted by Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke.. Structural coloration in animals, and a few plants, is the production of colour by microscopically structured surfaces fine enough to interfere with visible light instead of pigments, although some structural coloration occurs in combination ...
The cluster with the most pixels becomes the dominant color. This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: How birds get their colors. A visual guide to our gorgeous friends.
Incomplete albinism is the complete absence of pigment from the skin, eyes, or feathers, but not all three. [17] An albino juvenile house crow in Malacca, Malaysia, next to its normal-coloured parent. A completely albino bird is the most rare. The eyes in this case are pink or red, because blood shows through in the absence of pigment in the ...
Most feather pigments are melanins (brown and beige pheomelanins, black and grey eumelanins) and carotenoids (red, yellow, orange); other pigments occur only in certain taxa – the yellow to red psittacofulvins [33] (found in some parrots) and the red turacin and green turacoverdin (porphyrin pigments found only in turacos).
The legs are short and reddish colored. The beak is short and dark, usually a brown-black hue. [17] The plumage is generally light gray-brown and lighter and pinkish below. The wings have black spotting, and the outer tail feathers are white, contrasting with the black inners. Below the eye is a distinctive crescent-shaped area of dark feathers.
Both sexes of turkey possess caruncles, although they are more pronounced in the male. Usually they are pale, but when the male becomes excited or during courtship, the caruncles, wattle and snood all engorge with blood, become bright red or blue, and enlarge. [9] The beard (a tuft of modified brush-like feathers) also becomes erect.
There are five known psittacofulvin pigments - tetradecahexenal, hexadecaheptenal, octadecaoctenal and eicosanonenal, in addition to a fifth, currently-unidentified pigment found in the feathers of scarlet macaws. [5] Colorful feathers with high levels of psittacofulvin resist feather-degrading Bacillus licheniformis better than white ones. [6]