With all do respect to you land lovers i like my wings. But i'm worried do i count within the furry community. On the one hand my persona is an anthropomorphic bird, on the other i have feathers not fur
I've been a dragon in this fandom since about 1995 and I don't think anyone has ever said I don't belong in the furry scene because I am covered in scales instead of fur.
If you like to present as some kind of animal person, then you are a furry.
Yes, they count. As has already been said by others, “furry” when used to refer to the community is not limited to “creatures having fur” but is used broadly to cover all sorts of creatures including those with scales, feathers, etc.
The furry fandom is more about liking anthropomorpism and general animalistic features like tails and snouts (tho one doesn't have to have all of them) than fur specifically. Consider synths, for example, which are an accepted furry species despite not having fur, not even being animals or even biological creatures, and just kinda being shaped like some sort of anthro animal but not any species in particular. Birds definitely fit.
Yeah, synths are definitely on the edge of what'd be considered furry. They're usually draconic or reptile-adjacent in style (from the many I've seen), but there's no hard and fast rule to what a synth looks like.
Birds might lack fur, but that doesn't mean that they aren't part of our community. I mean, if dragon and shark fursonas can be part of the fandom, why wouldn't birds?
As Juniper puts it, Furry has always been a general umbrella term. The only limit as to what animal counts as part of our fandom is your imagination.
Good point, but birds only have one mass extinction separating them from lizards, whereas mammals have two.
Also, cursory Google search suggests that the consensus opinion is that hair and feathers are an example of convergent evolution, although the timeline is so tight that they could have split off from each other when mammals and dinosaurs split off from the therapsids.
Plenty of species have feathers, scales, rough or smooth skin, or even exoskeletons. There are also furries that don't even have a sona; it personally took me almost 6 years to decide on something because I'm so indecisive.
I feel like the general consensus is that "furry" refers to both all anthros (using this term for short because the alternative is super long) AND also just the furred ones. So yes, avians are furries, but they aren't furries furries (if that makes any sense at all)