Lehigh Valley bird experts talk about rare, half-male, half-female cardinal
A rare half-male, half-female cardinal sighting last week in western Pennsylvania has birders and scientists across the state a-twitter.
Seasoned birder Jamie Hill, of Waterford, Erie County, snagged a picture of the cardinal behind a home in neighboring Warren County, USA Today reported. The bird appeared to be split down the middle — bright red on one side and brownish white on the other.
While sightings of a cardinal like that are rare, Lehigh Valley experts said it’s a great way to get peoples’ attention and turn it towards birding, and specifically to preserving the environment to protect bird populations. And it illustrates that there’s more variation in birds and other animals than most may think. Ornithologist Daniel Klem said that the cardinal Hill spotted is a gynandromorph, meaning half the bird’s body is male and the other half is female. It’s a split that happens very early on in the bird’s development.
“It’s unusual and a novelty that attracts a lot of people,” he said. “People like me that are professionals are going to be interested in the ruddy details of biology, but the general public and the people who are interested in birds in general — they’re just excited to see this.”
It’s a “strikingly obvious” condition in cardinals, said Peter G. Saenger, ornithological specialist at the Acopian Center for Ornithology at Muhlenberg College.
“The males are bright, bright red and the females are a dull, brownish red,” Saenger said. “They are literally are half-male, half-female, including their internal organs. So, they can actually have testes and ovaries.”
For Mike Butler, associate professor of biology at Lafayette College, a sighting like this raises some questions.
“What if this happened with a crow? No one would ever know,” Butler said. “Things like that are exciting to me because, one, it’s very neat and very interesting, and two, it kind of raises the possibility of how often does this happen and we don’t even notice it.”
But unfortunately, experts don’t predict birds with similar conditions to the cardinal to thrive.
“They express traits that natural selection — like a predator or some other disease or some debilitation associated with the malady — results in their demise. It’s an expectation that animals like this do not survive very long in the wild,” Klem said. “Given the fact that they’re male and female on each side, they’re not likely to be attractive to either sex when it comes to mating, even if they were to survive.”
Saenger, who has also served as president of the Lehigh Valley Audubon Society for 16 years, said he’d love to have one show up at his bird feeders, “but then I’d have 10,000 people in my backyard.”
In the past, when a rare bird is spotted, ornithologists, bird enthusiasts and photographers flock to area where it was seen, so the exact location of the sighting is rarely disclosed.
“If this bird is kind of constantly being chased, it would suffer from that,” Butler said. “… It’s a good reason to not give the exact location. The bird would probably be run ragged.”
The popularity is a good thing, though, as long as people don’t crowd the bird, because it can get more people interested in bird-watching and preservation efforts that can ripple out to improve the health of the environment overall.