Bird Silhouettes with Feather Cutouts: 20 Designs with a Cardinal, Robin, Wren, Kingfisher and Nest

Most birds in this silhouette set are sitting still. A cardinal grips a branch with its crest raised, a robin stands with its weight on both feet, and a swan floats with its neck curved back. In the black of every solid design, the feathers are cut out as rows of small openings, so the birds look like dark paper cuttings rather than flat shadows.

Perched, standing and afloat

Thirteen of the twenty birds are off the wing. A horned owl sits on a stubby branch (06), the cardinal perches with its long tail hanging below the branch (08), and the American robin (09) and the crow (10) simply stand. The swan (11) rests on the water, the heron (12) stands tall on thin legs with a plume at the back of its head, and a parrot (14) holds onto a short perch with its long tail angled down. The woodpecker (15) clings to the side of a tree trunk.

Five more put the bird in a small scene. A songbird (16) and a wren with its tail cocked up (17) each sit on a twig with leaves, a small bird stands on the rim of a woven nest holding two eggs (18), and two round little birds face each other on one leafy branch (19). The kingfisher (20) is big-headed, with a shaggy crest and a long dagger bill, perched on a broken branch.

The seven in the air

The rest are flying. Design 01 is seven geese in a V, and design 02 scatters five small birds across the canvas, a hummingbird and a swallow among them. A swallow with long tail streamers (03), a gull (04), an eagle with its talons out (05), a hovering hummingbird (07) and a dove with both wings raised (13) complete the set.

The papercut is the detailed one

START-HERE.txt describes the solid version as black papercut artwork with decorative feather openings, not a filled shape, and that’s what you’ll see. The swan’s back is a mass of separate feather shapes, the owl’s chest is patterned with rows of marks, and the woven nest is mostly holes. Each solid DXF holds between 30 and 156 closed shapes, so the openings are many and small. They print crisply on paper at full size. For cutting, START-HERE notes that small details need larger cuts, so the full-page size or bigger is the safer starting point, and the files haven’t been print- or cut-tested.

The outline keeps only the edge

The outline traces the outside of each bird as one even band with the inside left open. It works for tracing, for a simple stencil shape or for coloring in, but it carries none of the papercut’s detail. Some birds read better than others this way: the cardinal’s crest, the heron’s plume and the kingfisher’s ragged crest still show in the edge, while the robin and the crow become plain bird shapes.

Sizes on paper and screen

The SVG and DXF files use a 10-inch square canvas with each bird up to 8.5 inches across. In the US Letter Full-Page PDFs a design prints about 6.2 inches at its longest side, and on the Four-Up pages each copy is about 3 inches. The two flocks contain separate birds, so keep the group together when you resize it. START-HERE asks you to print at Actual Size (100%) with Fit to Page turned off, and to confirm inch scale when you import a DXF.

Questions

Does the outline version keep any of the feathers?

No. The outline is a single band around the outside of each bird with nothing drawn inside. The eggs in the nest design disappear, and the two birds facing each other on a branch join into one connected shape. If you want feathers, eyes or eggs, use the solid version.

Do the four-per-page sheets mix different birds?

No. Each page of a Four-Up PDF repeats one design four times, and the pages run through all 20 designs in the same order as Design-Index.csv.