Chignik Lake, Alaska Peninsula, June 7, 2020
To the best of my knowledge, no one has counted the number of feathers on Pinicola enucleator, – or if they have, they haven’t made their findings readily available via a Google search. At eight to 10 inches from bill tip to tail tip, Pine Grosbeaks are large as songbirds go. The smallest species of hummingbirds have slightly less than a thousand feathers; Emperor Penguins, which have huge numbers of tiny feathers to insulate them from the cold sport something like 80,000 feathers. In between these extremes, counts and estimates vary, but based on reports for specific species, something over three thousand is probably a good approximation of the total feather count for our friend in the above photograph.
JD
CutterLight 
There is so much beautiful detail in your close-up. Thank you also for sharing the details about the number of feathers of different birds.
One can’t help but wonder if some of the ornithologists who killed thousands of birds in the name of science ever took the trouble of counting an individual bird’s feathers.
Those stories – some of them not so long ago – about ornithologists walking through forests and fields with shotguns… And then you see drawers filled with Ivory-billed Woodpeckers… I can’t understand what they were thinking.
😦
I feel the same way.