“Awkward” would probably be the most benevolent word I could use to describe the explosive launch into flight of the California quail. Certainly, the words graceful or athletic do not come to mind.

A paper published last year in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface described a feather as a masterpiece of engineering, one comprising nine orders of magnitude, from the nanoscale to the meter ...

Shimmery. Spiky. Shaggy. Soft. Feathers are what make birds so alluring—but these photographs remind us that they also tell a story about the science of evolution. It may seem wildly impractical, but ...