Lead You to Experience the Ultimate Black Feather

Many birds have black feathers, and one of the most familiar is the crow. Good birds are rejected and considered bad omens simply because their feathers are black.

But in fact, any bird with black feathers cannot compare to the Glossy Bird, because only they pursue and achieve the ultimate blackness. The degree is roughly like turning oneself into an emoji.

This picture is a clip from BBC Earth. This male is showing off to the female. When he spreads his wings like a fan, except for a bright blue, almost all of his features disappear on the front, turning into a piece of blackness.

Their feathers seem to swallow light, even the traces of the outline. These feathers are so black that they lose all details. So that their body parts look like they are not real animals, more like a flat black board.

And the Glossy Bird is so dark because these feathers are different from other birds.

Researchers used electron microscopy to scan the feathers of the Glossy Bird and found that their feathers have an unusual microstructure.

The central axis of a normal bird feather is called 'feather axis,' with fine branches or hooks growing on it, or even finer branches growing from the fine branches, the structure is flat, almost all located in the same plane.

But the Glossy Bird's feathers look very different. Their feather branches are not lying flat but are bent upwards, very dense, and overlapping and lying flat. On the other hand, they also have a complex branching structure, which looks like small leaves, and the overall appearance is similar to a toothbrush.

These unique structures are very good at capturing light. When light hits a normal feather, most of the light will be reflected back. But if the light happens to hit the Glossy Bird's super-black feathers, it will find that the surface of the feather is parallel to its route. The light has no escape, only repeatedly scattered in these upright structures, and each bounce will absorb more energy, step by step lost themselves.

Experiments show that the light-capturing technology of these super-black feathers is very high, can absorb up to 99.95% of the incident light. Compared with most black bird feathers, it is 10—100 times better.

Vantablack, produced in the UK, is the blackest material designed by humans, it is made of vertically aligned carbon nanotubes, and can also absorb 99.965% of the incident light using the same principle.

To see the difference between super-black feathers and other feathers more intuitively, Dakota McCoy of Harvard University did the experiment below.

She painted ordinary black bird feathers and Glossy Bird feathers with gold powder and put them on a gold tabletop. The ordinary black bird feathers look metallic and golden, while the super-black feathers still look like shadows.

There are many animals and plants in the world that use microstructures to produce brilliant colors with metallic luster, such as some butterflies and Gaboon snakes. But species that use microstructures to completely absorb light color are relatively rare.

The former is to better hide itself, in order to evade enemies or hunt prey. But the Glossy Bird's evolved function is only used for courtship……

So only male Glossy Birds have such black feathers. The feathers are only grown on their wings, chests, and other areas that show off during courtship.

Why do these birds show off their so dark feathers during courtship? Researchers believe that because super-black feathers can absorb light, create a pure black background, so they can make colorful feathers stand out, which increases the attractiveness to female.

As long as you look carefully, you will find that Glossy Birds only show their front to the female, and the back side without super-black feathers looks no different from ordinary black bird species. So it's not enough to rely on black technology to find the other half, you also need to practice agility.