Necessity of pulling broken blood feathers. One usenet newsgroup that I've been reading every day since the summer of 1993 is rec.pets.birds . I've put this page together to help answer the FAQ about blood feathers . I searched the web and was surprised that the search engines I tried did not turn up any pages with pictures of blood feathers.
Blood feathers are new feathers that are still growing and developing.
As the new feather develops and matures, the keratin sheath wears or is preened off, and the feather is exposed. Blood feathers are sometimes called pin feathers , because some areas on the bird, like the head, have blood feathers that are much smaller than those that other areas have. Most of these blood feathers were modelled by Sidney, who is really the avian version of Gumby . Here's a picture of Ralph, who's really very forgiving and will take every opportunity to run to me and beg for scratchies, even immediately after gratuitous tail touching. Photo by Peter Yuen .