Believe it or not, I use paint effect to create the planes. Here is the workflow:
1. Paint strokes on the bird body row by row from head to the bottom
2. apply a "non-mash" paint brush, I use pineTextured
3. pick one of the storke and convert it to polygon
4. change the flatness 1 and 2 to 1 in the brush profile and turn on forward facing (something like that, I forgot the actal term)
5. create a locator, connect the translate to the camera point of the polyShape you just converted
6. play with the "force" under the brush attributes, you can increase the gravity, etc...
7. you can keep change the look (width, length, etc) and the other setting under the brush attributes
8. repeat this for second row, so on... or you can set all the strokes to share the same brush, then break it down again to change the size of plane for different row.
It's a little complex, but you will have a lot of control over the look of the planes. The locator is for control the direction the planes will face.
Another I can think of is instead of use pfx, use hair system to create the hair, then assign a pfx brush to it. Then convert the pfx to poly just as the above. This method could be better for animation since the hair system will take care of the dynamics.
Also you can always use the geometryPaint function to paint the planes on the bird directly. Here is a simple tutoial for that:
http://wargasm.fortawesome.com/tutorial ... ntTut.html