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Tuesday, August 4, 2015

Profiles in Rickery: the Rictal Bristle

Hold on just a second.  I know that something about the term "rictal bristle" sounds rather...shady.  But it's not.  As you can see, it's quite normal.  
Rictal bristles are, essentially, just stiff feathers found around the bill and eyes of birds.  They may be like bird eyelashes.  Birdlashes?  Beaklashes? Billashes?

 In truth, based on a minimal amount of reading I've done, it seems as though science has yet to determine what purposes they fully serve for the bird.

If you're interested in making your own judgments, you can read more in this paper entitled The Role of Avian Rictal Bristles by Roger J Lederer in 1971, which was truly the heyday for bristle-talk.  Here's another blog post about them, and another quick post here.

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2 comments:

  1. axeAugust 5, 2015 at 9:17 AM

    My rictal bristles are bristling at the fact that Rick Perry has been left out of the first GOP debate.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Erik the RedAugust 6, 2015 at 12:39 PM

    Isn't it clear that the rictal bristles are keeping the beak from falling off?!?! C'mon science!

    ReplyDelete

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