Atlas of Feathers for Western Palearctic Birds

The Atlas of Feathers for Western Palearctic Birds is a collective project of the Feather Research Group, founded in 1972 by Wilfried Hansen. This monumental work, depicting the feathers of nearly all bird species recorded in the Western Palearctic, has been in the making for over 20 years. More than 150,000 feathers have been scanned for this encyclopedia, both in private feather collections and in many natural history museums. These scans, digitally composed into beautiful pterylographies, reveal hidden details of all major plumages, including Slender-billed Curlew (Numenius tenuirostris) and Algerian Nuthatch (Sitta ledanti).

The Atlas of Feathers for Western Palearctic Birds will consist of a 2-volume concise edition and a 9-volume full edition. The concise edition of the Atlas of Feathers for Western Palearctic Birds is scheduled to come out in 2019, starting with the passerine volume. The concise edition will present the most important identifying features of each species’ feathers on a highly reduced overview page. In the full edition, this highly reduced overview page will be followed by one or several full-page pterylographies, which will depict each species’ plumage in much more detail and in larger size.

Feather identification is of great significance for nature conservation authorities because it is possible to prove the existence of an endangered bird species in a given locality by a single moulted feather. Therefore, the work of the Feather Research Group is supported by the Jane Goodall Institute and by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The Atlas of Feathers for Western Palearctic Birds is a long-awaited work that will benefit both the conservation community and individual birders.

October 2023: Update on the Atlas of Feathers for Western Palearctic Birds

The World Feather Atlas Foundation provided 5 large scanners to the Featherbase team, which are being used to digitize the world’s largest scientific feather collection built up by Dr. Wolf-Dieter Buschig as well as several other feather collections. The scans of these feather collections are uploaded on the website www.featherbase.info and include feathers of about 2000 bird species so far. For the remaining bird species of the world, we analyze photographs provided by the Macaulay Library of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. For many rare and extinct species, Naturalis Biodiversity Center in The Netherlands provides photographs of museum specimens. In this way, we are able to include all the bird species of the world in the Introductory Volume to our World Feather Atlas Series.

This Introductory Volume to the World Feather Atlas Series is scheduled to come out in March 2024. The Feather Research Group is happy to announce that this global framework will create a meaningful context for the Atlas of Feathers for Western Palearctic Birds and will serve as a basis for our Species Editors to derive their texts from this global context.

Once the Introductory Volume is out, the series will move forward from there. The editors will announce the appearance date of the different volumes as soon as the amount of work that goes into each volume can be quantified more precisely. The illustrations of feathers for the concise passerines volume were completed in June 2022 and much work has already flowed into the illustrations of feathers for the concise non-passerines volume.