It’s easy to say that a crow is “all black.” You don’t have to be a birdwatcher to know that all of a crow’s feathers are black. But a closer look reveals that, at any given moment, even though all of the crow’s feathers are the same color, they do not all look the same. This is partly because of body contours and real-world lighting effects and partly because the feathers on different parts of the body have different textures.
Imagine a jacket made of alternating strips of different fabrics: velvet, cotton, and silk. Even if all of the fabric was dyed to exactly the same color (for example, black), the distinctive textures would make the strips of different fabrics obvious. The different textures of feathers on a bird create similar effects.
In a typical landbird like a crow, the body feathers are always relatively soft and flexible, while the large feathers of the wings and tail are stronger, straighter, and stiffer. As a general rule, the body feathers have little or no gloss (with the notable exception of iridescent species like grackles and others). Wing and tail feathers, on the other hand, always have a slightly glossy sheen no matter the species or the color.
One small patch of feathers that is never glossy is the lores — the small area between the eye and the bill. Feathers there are tiny and upright, creating a fuzzy or bristly surface more like velvet. If those feathers are colored black, as they are on crows and many other species, they reflect no light at all and appear truly black. On crows and other black birds, the lores always appear solid black, in contrast with the slight sheen on the forehead and cheeks.
The broad pattern shown by the crow depicted above is common to many species of birds. Feathers on the lores are never glossy. Feathers on the head and underside are a little bit glossy, and feathers of the wings and tail are always subtly glossy. It’s easy to appreciate these differences on a crow or some other uniformly colored bird. It’s less obvious on, say, a sparrow, but feather texture still has a consistent effect on how we perceive the colors of the bird.
A version of this article was published in the September/October 2019 issue of BirdWatching.
Where feather colors come from: Why cardinals are red and grackles are shiny
Read our newsletter!
Sign up for our free e-newsletter to receive news, photos of birds, attracting and ID tips, and more delivered to your inbox.
Sign Up for Free
