![]() If that’s the case, LeBaron says, it’s likely that once the bird’s health improves it will lose its yellow feathers during its next molt and turn red. That might inhibit the bird’s ability to produce its red color. He points out that the bird's feathers and crest look frayed, an indicator that the cardinal might be having a hard winter, suffering from environmental stress or a poor diet. It’s also possible that the bird is sick, Geoff LeBaron, Audubon’s Christmas Bird Count director tells Saha. "Songbirds like cardinals almost never consume red pigments rather they consume abundant yellow pigments," Hill tells Pillion. "So, to be red, cardinals have to biochemically convert yellow pigments to red." It can also be some combination of both mechanisms. For some, this is a matter of differences in absorption of food pigments, for others it's reactions within the bird that convert one colored pigment to another. ![]() One is xanthochroism, a genetic mutation found in insects and some birds which causes red pigments to be replaced by yellow. So why is the normally brilliant red cardinal bright yellow? Researchers aren’t sure exactly, but Purbita Saha at writes that there are a couple of possibilities. "It kind of took my breath away a little bit." "As soon as it landed, I was starstruck," he tells Elaina Zachos at National Geographic. “I finally saw it after about five hours.” “As soon as I saw it on her social media, I was kind of curious and I wanted to go explore and see if I could find it,” Black tells Pillion. So far, the best images of the bird have come from Stephenson’s friend, professional photographer Jeremy Black, who staked out her backyard last week. Pillion reports that the bird has continued to visit Stephenson’s feeders at least once a day in the past few weeks, though she isn’t willing to give out her address for fear of being mobbed by bird enthusiasts. As Dennis Pillion at AL.com reports, Stephenson posted iPhone images of the bird on Facebook and biologists soon confirmed that the yellow bird is indeed a male Northern Cardinal with a very rare color variation. It looked just like a cardinal-the bright crimson bird common across the eastern United States-except this one was the color of mustard. ![]() In late January, something odd appeared on Charlie Stephenson’s bird feeder in Alabaster, Alabama.
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