Plucking

Pluck or plucking may refer to:

Plucking (hair removal)

Plucking or tweezing can mean the process of removing human hair, animal hair or a bird's feathers by mechanically pulling the item from the owner's body.

In humans, this is done for personal grooming purposes, usually with tweezers. An epilator is a motorised hair plucker. Those under the influence of deliriants or trichotillomania may pluck their own hair out of habit.

Roman baths employed personnel solely to pluck hair from their clients' bodies.

In birds and animals, plucking is usually carried out by humans, sometimes called pluckers, to the carcass of the subject as part of food preparation.

Poultry

Feathers can be removed either manually or in a tumbling machine. Both methods require the feathers to be first loosened by submerging the slaughtered bird in hot water. Manual plucking involves pulling out the larger feathers then removing the down with a rubbing action. Automated plucking machines use rubber posts protruding from the inside of a spinning drum to pull the feathers from the bird. This process takes less than 30 seconds, whereas manual plucking typically takes several minutes.

Plucking (glaciation)

Plucking, also referred to as quarrying, is a glacial phenomenon that is responsible for the erosion and transportation of bedrock, especially large "joint blocks". This occurs in a type of glacier called a "valley glacier". As a glacier moves down a valley, friction causes the basal ice of the glacier to melt and infiltrate joints (cracks) in the bedrock. The freezing and thawing action of the ice enlarges, widens, or causes further cracks in the bedrock as it changes volume across the ice/water phase transition (a form of hydraulic wedging), gradually loosening the rock between the joints. This produces large pieces of rock called joint blocks. Eventually these joint blocks come loose and become trapped in the glacier.

In this way, plucking has been linked to regelation. Rocks of all sizes can become trapped in the bottom of the glacier. Joint blocks up to three meters have been "plucked" and transported. These entrained rock fragments can also cause abrasion along the subsequent bedrock and walls. Plucking also leads to chatter marks, wedge shaped indentations left on the bedrock or other rock surfaces. Glacial plucking both exploits pre-existing fractures in the bedrock and requires continued fracturing to maintain the cycle of erosion. Glacial plucking is most significant where the rock surface is well jointed or fractured or where it contains exposed bed planes, as this allows meltwater and clasts to penetrate more easily.