Avian

Avian character. Art by Dustmeat.

Avians, also known as featheries (In the furry fandom), are birds or bird-like characters and/or people who generally identifies with said phenotype. As characters, this includes real birds, anthropomorphic birds, fantasy birds, and bird variants such as gryphons or cockatrices.

Overview

Anthropomorphic avians can be broadly classed as either bird or griffin-anthropomorph. The differences between mammal and bird anatomy can result in difficult questions when designing an anthropomorphic character.

Characteristics

Anatomical features

• Arms: In real birds, wings are extended forelimbs with long, strong feathers, meaning that a direct anthropomorphization would result in a being with wings instead of arms. There are four main ways around this:
  • "Toony" wings, in which the wing feathers double as fingers. This is frequently seen in cartoons but is very unrealistic.
  • Normal wings, in which the character possesses regular bird wings, which is possibly the most popular option.
  • "Wing arms", which are wings modified into arms. This takes into account the wing's evolutionary history as a forelimb, which often shows claws on wings. This feature can be seen today in a vestigial form in juveniles hoatzins.
  • Back-mounted wings, and arms; are the second most popular option, as they enable flight and dexterity, but that can also be achieved by all other options as birds grip onto objects with their feet and talons.

• Legs:
  • Most real avians are digitigrades, the bird's "knees" actually being their ankles; this is not normally reflected in anthro avians, although when they are used the foot proportions are normally modified to be closer to human-like proportions.

Sexual anatomy and reproduction

• Male
  • Some male avians have a phallus (penis), including ostrich, emu, rhea, ducks, geese, and swans. However, many artists draw anthropomorphic avian characters with a phallus regardless of species. Less ambiguity is a major advantage of griffins, in which the rear half is not avian.

In nature, most male birds deposit sperm in the female through their cloacae to fertilize their eggs, but cloacae are extremely rare on male avian characters anyway.

• Females
  • Breasts on females? These are often the only clear indication of gender, but real birds, not being mammals, lack them.
  • Oviposition is the avian process of laying eggs for (normally) reproduction (a process shared by scalies, fish and monotremes). They're usually laid with the help of a very human-like set of reproductive organs (vagina, vulva, uterus, etc.), despite real female birds possessing a cloaca (or "vent") instead, passing eggs through what is essentially an anus.

Female avians usually lay multiple eggs at once, whereas real birds lay one a day throughout a period.

See also

• Bird (mammals)
• Category: Avian characters

External links

• Avian search results in DeviantArt
• Avian search results in Fur Affinity

This stub about a term could be expanded.