You are right. It just looks scraggy due to moult.
My most surrealistic experience with the species happened when (in Chateauneuf du Pape) I was indoors talking to a wine producer. He asked me if I was a journalist, since I had asked for an interview, told him no, a taxidermist. Just a few seconds later I saw a small bird flying directly towards us, smashed into the window, and fell dead to the ground.
Told him casually that this what the kind of sad incidents which provided me my bread-and-butter-work....
