Higher Elevation Himalayan Songbirds Sport Thicker Down “Jackets” to Survive the Cold – SciTechDaily

Sahas Barve, a Peter Buck Fellow at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, led a new study to examine feathers across 249 species of Himalayan songbirds, finding that birds living at higher elevations have more of the fluffy down — the type of feathers humans stuff their jackets with — than birds from lower elevations. Published on Feb. 15 in the journal Ecography, the study also finds that smaller-bodied birds, which lose heat faster than larger birds, tend to have longer feathers…

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