How Do Birds Stay Dry? {Science Experiment}

Here’s a fun and simple science experiment that demonstrates how birds stay warm and dry!

This activity is perfect for a science unit on birds or a unit on animals in the winter.

I would recommend this activity for preschoolers and elementary students, although middle schoolers will definitely find this interesting as well. Even as an adult, I thought it was super cool!

We host a Ranch School on our property, and it’s seriously one of my favorite things. Basically, Ranch School is an outdoor school for kids where we feed the animals, learn about some aspect of agriculture like growing seeds or the parts of a chicken, and then we ride the horses. This past week we learned about how our animals stay warm in the winter.

Janie has been collecting feathers from our chickens whenever she finds a good one, so we had a good stash for this experiment.

Supplies Needed:

• Bird feathers – chicken, duck, etc.
• A piece of felt or other fabric
• Water
• A dropper

Purpose of the experiment: To compare how water affects a chicken feather as compared with fabric.

The procedure for this experiment is super simple. Use a dropper to drop water onto a feather. What can you observe?

The water beads up on the feather and rolls right off! In fact, you can’t even tell that the feather was ever wet.

We were able to get several drops to combine. It’s really amazing to see the water piled up on the feather and not soaking in at all.

If you want to catch lots of droplets, try the underside of the feather. It’s waterproof too!

Now let’s compare with a piece of felt.

Every drop soaks right through! Our felt was soggy and wet after just a few drops.

The science behind this experiment:

Chicken feathers are not completely waterproof, but they are very water resistant. Part of this is due to the fact that chickens have a gland called the uropygial gland that secretes an oil. When chickens preen their feathers, they spread this oil onto them.

Although bird feathers do contain this oil coating, the primary reason that their feathers resist water is their design.

Contour feathers, which are the outer feathers, contain tiny barbs that interlock to create a tight, smooth surface that won’t allow water droplets to penetrate. You have probably noticed that you can easily pull apart the sections of a feather. When a bird preens itself, its beak “zips” those barbs back together again and makes the feather nice and smooth.

If a chicken stands out in the rain, she will eventually get quite wet! But the feather design does keep them from immediately getting soaked, giving them time to look for cover. We’ve also noticed that our chickens dry very quickly if they do get wet. Feathers are amazing things!