Bird Feathers

Oscar is one of the teddy bears' best friends and often visits them or they visit him. He likes to take photographs and one day he visited with WalkerBear and he brought his camera with him.

He was in the garden looking for things to photograph when a bird flew up off the grass and dropped a feather.

Never one to miss an opportunity to snap away, Oscar went over to the feather and took a picture of it. It was very pretty and had a lovely splash of yellow on it.

Scary was in the garden too, doing some weeding. "What's that you've got Oscar?" he asked. "A feather", Oscar replied, "but I don't know what bird it is from." Scary said they could perhaps look it up in their bird book.

"Gather some more feathers together, if you can find any, and we'll go and have a look to see which birds they are from" he said.

Oscar walked around the garden and gathered as many feathers as he could and took them inside, mainly so that the feathers didn't blow away in the wind, and laid them on the table.

"It looks like you have five different birds' feathers here" said Scary, "Let's get the book and start looking for which birds they are from."

They started with the feather with the yellow on it. It wasn't a very long feather so perhaps it was only from a small bird, so they looked in that section of the book first.

Was it from a Yellowhammer as they have yellow feathers? No, it didn't look like the feather came from that bird, according to the book. "Let's keep looking" said Scary. After turning a few more pages, there it was - a Goldfinch, and the feather was from its wing.

Never one to be left out if he could help it, WalkerBear asked "Can I help you look up the feathers?"

Of course he was allowed to join in. So they spent a happy hour or two, looking through the book at all the pretty birds and eventually Oscar thought they had recognised them all.

They had feathers from Goldfinch, Woodpigeon, Collared Dove, Jackdaw and a Woodpecker (they decided it was a Great Spotted Woodpecker because of the spots on the feathers).

Look at the picture of all the feathers on this page and see if you can tell which feather was from which bird. Check your answers by clicking here. You could perhaps go into your garden or to the park and take photographs or collect your own feathers to identify. Have fun!