the blue jay. The brilliant blue patterns on the tail and the blue in its chest is just light being used to fool your eye. Think of the feather like a prism that refracts light. “They call it a ...

The blue we see is created by light refracting within the structure of the feathers and ... The next time you find a blue jay feather, take it home, and hit it with a hammer.

in the feather that, in cardinals, is actually originally derived from their diet of fruit and seeds. Instead of using pigments, blue birds use the microscopic structure of their feathers to ...

What makes a blue jay blue or a cardinal red ... from either pigments or from light refraction caused by the structure of the feather; in some cases, it’s a combination of the two.

A blue jay's wing feathers ... the same substance that makes up human hair and fingernails. But keratin's feather structure allows for tiny air pockets in feather barbs to act like a prism ...

Take blue jays for example, which only appear blue due to the structure of their feathers ... If you were to take a blue jay feather and grind it up or place it on a white, lit surface, it ...

leaving a structure of keratin protein interspersed with air pockets, like a sponge or a box of spaghetti. When white light strikes a blue feather, the keratin pattern causes red and yellow ...

By the time I got close enough to see that it wasn’t any sort of trash at all, the wind had lifted it and tossed it into our yard: a blue jay’s tail feather, newly molted. In late summer ...