I just realized that as a parrot owner, there’s a public service I should have performed a long time ago.
This is of course all how it works for real-world feather owners. By nature, any
human that has wings and can fly is a fantasy critter, so the real-world
rules don’t apply to them except insofar as you want them to. Also, feathered wings are of course not the only type of wings. But I hope you find this at least entertaining and maybe inspiring!
* Feathers smell kinda dusty, even when they’re still in.
* Feathers are ‘dead’ structures–like human hair that has already grown in. If you cut one, the feather’s owner won’t feel it. If you pull it out, it’ll sting but not do real damage.
* On the other hand, they’re still attached to the feather-owner at the follicle, so they can still feel it when the feather is touched. In fact, much like fur, this translates the sensation a little bit into the skin, making them fairly sensitive to touch.
* Parts of a feather: there is the shaft–the long rigid bit up the middle. The soft hairlike bits that come off either side of it are called barbs. Each barb also has tiny ‘barbules’ which come off the sides of that and are what make the feather sides stick together in those sleek shapes when you stroke it.
* Kinds of feathers: The best-known types, the ones that people like to pick up and collect, are actually usually flight feathers (from the wings) or tail feathers. They’re the longest ones, and are also called quills. As the largest feathers on the body, these often have pretty colors and patterns, so as to enhance courting or threat displays. Contour feathers are the surface feathers from anywhere else, including the rest of the wing. They are also colored. And then there are down feathers. These are super soft and fluffy and don’t have much structure, and they’re generally white. They grow under the contour feathers and help hold warmth. You normally don’t see them unless you poke through a bird’s feathers, although sometimes they might peek out if the feathers get disheveled.
* Feathers are maintained via preening. Preening isn’t just smoothing the barbs of the feather; it also deposits a coating of natural body oils on the feather to keep it conditioned. If this sounds weird, just think about your own hair. We do it too. Birds have a preen gland on their rump that produces this oil. Humans produce it all over, although particularly in areas of the body that grow a lot of hair, so a winged human might just run their hands repeatedly over their feathers to get it well-distributed through their feathers.
* Shampooing feathers really isn’t advised–it makes them brittle and bedraggled–but if humans had feathers, I imagine we might wash them with water and maybe very VERY light cleanser and then buy feather oil to replenish them.
* Feathers shed and regrow on a regular basis. This is called molting (verb) or molt (noun). Since a flying human would possess a honking huge set of wings, they would probably have one full molt a year, maximum (although they might also partially molt, shedding only some of their feathers per so that they might cycle through a full set of plumage maybe once every two years).
* Molting is energy-intensive, and also itchy. Birds get constantly hungry and often super-snuggly or cranky or both. Significant amounts of preening are required as new feathers grow in. Someone in molt would need to make sure they get enough protein (feathers are made of keratin), and would desire to minimize the amount of stress they’re facing at the time because 1: molting is annoying enough and 2: stress (e.g. danger, or poor health, or heaps of aggravating work) can affect the health and beauty of a new set of feathers growing in. It can even lead to something called ‘stress bars’ which is a discoloration in the feathers. So then they’d go around for the next year or so with everybody able to tell that they were having a bad time during their last molt. EMBARRASSING.
* Even outside of molt, if a feather is pulled out, then it will immediately start to regrow.
* PINFEATHERS. If you’ve seen pictures of baby birds, you may have seen that they are all spiky. This is because when feathers grow in, they are covered with a keratin sheath. It’s pointy and super itchy and annoying. Once the feather is finishing growing, the sheath needs to be preened off. This can be done easily, by gently rubbing at it till it comes loose. Hence why a feather-owner in molt would have to do a LOT of preening (although it’s never as drastic as a baby growing in their first set of feathers). It definitely helps to have a friend to get those hard-to-reach places for you. This is why preening is a social bonding activity for birds.
* Bloodfeathers. When a feather is still growing in, wrapped in its sheath and still developing, it is still alive and extra-sensitive. There is bloodflow along the sheath of the feather (which is hollow–this is why). These are called bloodfeathers, because if you snap it at this point, it will bleed.
For a bird, this can be a big deal when it comes to their larger feathers. They don’t carry much extra blood and they don’t have very good clotting, so a bird who breaks a bloodfeather in their flight feathers or tail feathers can potentially bleed out. To prevent this, the remaining part of the feather must be fully plucked.
For a human, we carry extra blood and have better clotting (though a bird-human…who knows?), so we can withstand more blood loss. Also, opposable thumbs. But it’s a thing that could happen, and it would make a mess, hurt like a bitch and be potentially dangerous if left untreated.
Also, questions to ask yourself about your wing-humans, if you like world-building:
In the real world, bats and birds are very delicate, because everything about them has been optimized for flying. Flying is incredibly energy-intensive. I am not prepared to math the caloric expenditure, but it would be safe to say that flying for something as large as a human would burn thousands of calories PER HOUR. Thus, flying animals carry minimal extra weight. Hollow bones, very little blood beyond what they need, super-efficient processing of water, very quick digestion and frequent defecation (so as to not be toting around the extra weight of food in their gut).
They also have air sacs throughout their bodies–including the core of some bones–so that they can get enough breath to support that insanely intensive cardio.
So the question is–if you care about this stuff–how might your flying humans be constructed on the inside in order to make them lighter and more optimized for flying? (You don’t NEED to care about this, because realistically humans are probably too big to fly even if we were fine-tuned to be lighter and sleeker. So it’s all just an exercise in fun fantasy world-building anyway, but some people are into that.)
There’s probably more I’ve forgotten, but hopefully this is useful to somebody!
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