Big Buck Bunny Bird model question...

K, I was looking at the models for Big Buck Bunny, and found something I had never seen before, but could really help me with my future project.

On the birds wings and tail, there are little individual faces, and out of those are “projected” the feathers. I’m gonna guess that it has something to do with Dupliverts or some such. But how would one go about setting something like this up?

(PS. Great job on the movie guys, loved it lots!)

duplifaces, actually, but its the same overall workflow as dupliverts, just using the face normal instead of the vertex.

Dupliverts per the Manual