Clear Skin Post

We emailed our friend Sharon Gill with this question:

Do all birds have clear skin? We asked her because we couldn't find the answer anywhere. Here is what she said:

Birds have very, very thin skin and so it appears clear in most species. Some skin can have different colors - like the skin of vulture heads and I suspect that this skin is thicker than the skin found on the rest of their bodies. Check out some photos of antbirds - ocellated antbirds in particular. They have blue skin around their eyes - it's very neat! Biologists aren't sure why.

Thanks, Sharon!

Here is a cool picture of an ocellated antbird. I wanted to listen to the call and find out more about it.

We couldn't find the call. Oh, turkeys! (hee hee)

Facts we learned while making this post:

It lives in Columbia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Honduras, and Panama.

It eats insects and arthropods and sometimes small lizards. An arthropod is an invertebrate with an exoskeleton. We had to look that up.

It has a patch of bare blue skin around the eyes.