A unique bird who is half-female and half-male has been photographed in Pennsylvania by a birder who rushed out with his camera when he heard a companion had recognized the northern cardinal.
This is one in a 10 million case. Male cardinals are light red yet females are pale brown colored, proposing this example might be a blend of the two genders.
Retired ornithologist Jamie Hill, 69, told the BBC it was a “once-in-a-lifetime, one-in-a-million encounter”.
A friend of Mr Hill revealed to him that she had seen an “abnormal bird” going to her bird feeders in Warren County in the province of Pennsylvania.
From the first look, Mr. Hill contemplated whether the bird was leucistic – a term that implies the specimen would have a deficiency of pigmentation in its quills, yet would not be half-female, half-male.
However, subsequent to seeing cell phone pictures, he speculated it had what is called bilateral gynandromorphism, which is the point at which a bird would have both a working ovary and a working single testis.
Mr Hill photographed this bird for an hour and said: “After I captured the images, my heart was pounding for the next five hours until I could get home and process the digital images to see what I actually had, I have been searching for the long-thought-extinct ivory-billed woodpecker for almost two decades, and photographing this rare version of one of our most common backyard birds, this gynandromorph northern cardinal, was almost as exciting as I think I would get if I actually found the woodpecker,”