The foods that cardinals eat while molting and growing new feathers will determine the color intensity and hue of the new red feathers. Empty and rinse the bird bath every three days to prevent mosquitoes from breeding. Birds spend a lot of time maintaining feathers in good condition. In addition to providing drinking water, bird baths enable birds to maintain their feathers. They must hide for their own safety until their wing feathers regrow.īird baths with clean fresh water are extra helpful to birds this time of year. Some birds like ducks lose their wing feathers all at once, which leaves them flightless and vulnerable to predators. As the new replacement feather grows in, they lose the next feather. When it's time for wing feathers to molt, small songbirds rarely lose them all at once. If more than a few did, we would all be seeing bald cardinals. This explains the phenomena of the weird baldheaded cardinal. Sometimes a bird loses all the feathers in a tract such as the head tract at the same time. The molting process often starts with the head. Different feather tracts may molt in phases at different times. Feathers are not uniformly distributed over a bird's body. The normal procedure is for a bird to gradually lose a few feathers and fill in with new feathers. This molting process occasionally produces a baldheaded cardinal when a bird loses all its head feathers at the same time. They shed their feathers and grow new ones. Guess what most birds do after the nesting season. It's usually summer, after the nesting season, when these "black-headed" cardinals show up. Look again and you will see the orange-red cone-shaped bill (designed for eating seeds) that identifies male cardinals and distinguishes them from any other bird in Tennessee. But without binoculars, a photograph or a very close view in good light, who could know? People see the bare black skin and think they are seeing black feathers. Without the feathers, you see the cardinal's dark skin. If you look at Dave's photo, you'll see why people might think this bird has a black head. The cardinal had lost all of the bright red feathers that form the crest on top of the head plus some of the black feathers that make up the black face mask surrounding the bill. When a really odd looking male cardinal appeared in Dave Willis' yard in Karns, he took some pictures. And it may have been in your yard all year. I've had more than one person see such a bird and insist they have a rarity. Still to come, Pyrrhuloxia at The Pond, and Raccoons at Sweetwater and Burrowing Owls in Marana.It's the season for those weird baldheaded cardinals again.įrom a distance, without a close look through binoculars, you might think you're seeing a red bird with a black head - possibly some vagrant tropical rarity far out of its normal range. With that black beak, it still has a ways to go. Perhaps the same bird looking at us inquisitively.Īnd finally, a juvenile Cardinal. The demands of creating territories in the spring and raising young in the summer are great as are the demands that cold weather places on birds, making this time of year a good one to work on replacing feathers. Often molting happens at this time of year. Females are more tan or what I call “orange creamsicle” colored in their breast.Ī male Cardinal below is still completing his molt and getting in the rest of his feathers. While the male Cardinal is bright red, the female does have red in her crest, wings and tail but not like the male. One of my favorite shots of a female Cardinal. This fellow is missing his neck feathers now and his beak is beginning to turn orange so he is on his way to adulthood. Molting takes place gradually and over a period of several weeks. You can see how the red feathers have come in behind his eye, compared to the male in the photograph above. The amount of red on its breast makes me believe this is a male. That black bill lets us know this bird is a juvenile. Young birds go through several molts before all of their adult feathers and colors come in. His tail feathers look a bit stringy and he’s missing a bit of feathering behind his eye.Īn aspiring Cardinal (a young male beginning to get his adult feathers in) is perched here on a Cholla skeleton. Feathers become damaged through wear and tear and need to be replaced every so often.Ī dashing male Northern Cardinal on Saguaro ribs. A bird’s feathers are much like hair on people- they grow but aren’t “alive”. Molting is a natural and regular process where some or all of the bird’s feathers are replaced. Several of the birds are clearly in the middle of their molting. The photos below show several different Cardinals that came to the feeders at The Pond at Elephant Head. Northern Cardinals Are a common bird in the Foothills.
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