Birds also use 'whiskers' like cats

The showy coat is usually only considered a ornamental animal, but two biologists have demonstrated that a small seabird has used its hair on its head like a cat whisker to find its way in dark slots.

Known as whiskered auklets , this bird breeds on Aleutian and Kuril islands on the northern Pacific coast. They lay eggs in small niches, which can only be accessed through narrow roads between the rocks, where they only come and go at night.

Auklet using feathers is a tactile organ to find their way through narrow rocks in the night.(Photo: Nature)

Whiskered auklets are also the most sophisticated of the six known auklet species, and one of the only two species to feed at night. They have white fur stripes above and below the eyes, and a black feather comes out at the top of the head.

Sampath Seneviratne and Ian Jones from Memorial University in Canada, wondering if these hairs will help them feel the contact surface to go in the dark. To test this idea, the group captured 99 birds at night when they left or flew to the nest on Buldir Island, a fish on the Alaskan island of Aleutian, and placed them in a wooden maze similar to Road to a typical auklet nest. After that, they observed them with an infrared camera to see how they avoided obstacles and counted the number of times they hit the labyrinth.

Each bird is allowed to pass through the labyrinth three times - once with the face feathers sticking out, it is forced to tie, once tied the hair on its head but the long hairs are still free, and once the hairs are completely free . As a result, birds auklet pass through the labyrinth in the situation that their hair is pulled back twice more into the wall than when their feathers are free.

"It's interesting," the authors said. "This is the first study to show the true tactile benefits of these feathers."