Glossary of bird terms
The following is a glossary of common English language terms used in the description of birds—warm-blooded vertebrates of the class Aves and the only living dinosaurs.[1] Birds, who have feathers and the ability to fly (except for the approximately 60 extant species of flightless birds), are toothless, have beaked jaws, lay hard-shelled eggs, and have a high metabolic rate, a four-chambered heart, and a strong yet lightweight skeleton.
Among other details such as size, proportions and shape, terms defining bird features developed and are used to describe features unique to the class—especially evolutionary adaptations that developed to aid flight. There are, for example, numerous terms describing the complex structural makeup of feathers (e.g., barbules, rachides and vanes); types of feathers (e.g., filoplume, pennaceous and plumulaceous feathers); and their growth and loss (e.g., colour morph, nuptial plumage and pterylosis).
There are thousands of terms that are unique to the study of birds. This glossary makes no attempt to cover them all, concentrating on terms that might be found across descriptions of multiple bird species by bird enthusiasts and ornithologists. Though words that are not unique to birds are also covered, such as "back" or "belly", they are defined in relation to other unique features of external bird anatomy, sometimes called "topography". As a rule, this glossary does not contain individual entries on any of the approximately 11,000 recognised living individual bird species of the world.[2][3][a]
A
[edit]- addled eggs
- Also, wind eggs; hypanema.[5] Eggs that are not viable and will not hatch.[6] See related: overbrooding.
- adult plumage
- Adult plumage sufficiently developed and fixed following the juvenile and immature years such that it no longer changes significantly in appearance with further increasing age.[7][8]
- afterfeather
- Any structure projecting from the shaft of the feather at the rim of the superior umbilicus (at the base of the vanes), but typically a small area of downy barbs growing in rows or as tufts.[b] Entirely absent in some birds—notably from many members of the Columbidae family (pigeons and doves)—afterfeathers can significantly increase the insulative attributes of a bird's plumage.[10]
- allopreening
- A form of social grooming among birds, in which one bird preens another or a pair does so mutually. At times it may be used to redirect or sublimate aggression, such as one bird assuming a solicitation posture to indicate its non-aggression and invite allopreening by the aggressive individual.