Amazing blue feathers!

Bird feathers run such a beautiful spectrum, from brilliant yellows and oranges to deep reds to outstanding blues! This week I was preparing a lesson for my 4-H Club and learned something amazing and new about bird feather colors and want to share with you!

Some bird colors are from pigments, much like our own skin and hair colors. Some are dependent on what they eat (kind of like people...remember when you fed your baby a diet really heavy in carrots and their skin took on that orangey tinge? Still makes me laugh a little!)

But...the BLUES!!! Think of a gorgeous blue colored bird -- bluebird, bluejay, indigo bunting...there are many...

These beautiful blue colors are not created by pigments, but rather by structure!! Think of a prism or something like that which allows white light to be split. Blue feathers are made to appear blue by the actual structure of the feather!

As I was reading, I saw that if you view these "blue" feathers when lighted from the front (as we usually see them) they appear beautiful blue, but if viewed while backlit, they will just have a dull color. Of course I needed to experiment with this...Check this out!!

See this beautiful blue-green feather!
 Here's how it looks when lit with regular light, from the front.

But when I held it up to a window,
so that it was backlit with sunlight, look how dull it is!

Those two pictures are the same feather, the same orientation, looking at it from the same side...the only difference being that the lighting in the first was just regular room lighting, and in the second it was lit from behind!  

I also tried it with a flashlight, with similar results!  

Looks so pretty in regular room light

When lit from behind the blues disappear...

This one shows the difference, same feather, just part is backlit and
part is lit from the front!

Anyhow, I thought that this was pretty cool and would recommend you looking into it further! Here are a couple of good resources for you to read more about it: https://academy.allaboutbirds.org/how-birds-make-colorful-feathers/  and https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-are-some-feathers-blue-100492890/