idtoolkit ART AND TEXT BY DAVID ALLEN SIBLEY
64 BirdWatching • September/October 2019
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On sale October 29It’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 f lexible, 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 ref lect 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 closer look at crows
Why a crow might not appear to be ‘all black’
David Allen Sibley is the author of The Sibley
Guide to Birds, Second Edition, Sibley’s Birding
Basics, and field guides to the birds of eastern
and western North America. In our last issue,
he explained the four distinct groups of
shorebirds.Imagine a jacket made
of alternating strips of
different fabrics: velvet,
cotton, and silk.
VARIABLE APPEARANCE: An
American Crow showing its glossy
wings and tail and black lores.