Feather ID (1 Viewer)

[SLP55]

Found these the other day in the yard. Looks like either remains of a bird
that was eaten by a Hawk or maybe Hawk feathers from struggling
with prey (squirrel)?
Looking online with not much luck. What do you guys think?
Southeast Michigan, not in rural area. Have seen Cooper's Hawk, Red Tails.
Thanks, Sandy

 

[AveryBartels]

Northern Cardinal, only thing that I can think of in your rea with bright red tail feathers like that

 

[Butty]

I considered that too, but dismissed it (wrongly?) because the feathers didn't seem red enough, even for a female-type northern cardinal. I should call these feathers rufous rather than red - and definitely not 'bright red'.

 

[nartreb]

Female northern cardinal was my first assumption from the tail feathers, but the color tone seemed off and the black tip in the last photo threw me.

That looks like a wing primary in the last photo. Vivid orange with a black tip. Like a ruddy ground-dove or something -- but you shouldn't be having those in Michigan.

However, checking the Feather Atlas, it's absolutely fine for Northern Cardinal - male, not female.

The Feather Atlas - Feather Identification and Scans - U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Forensics Laboratory

Welcome to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Forensics Laboratory, the only Lab in the world devoted to crimes against wildlife. This home page summarizes our capabilities, and is geared toward our prominent audiences: science professionals, special agents and wildlife inspectors, and students...

www.fws.gov

 

[AveryBartels]

I didn't notice them earlier as I was more focused on the flight feathers but based on the red body feathers this would have been a male.

 

[Butty]

Again, I see strong rufous, orange-brown, even red-brown - but no red.

 

[nartreb]

Look for the very short body feathers - there's one at the top of the second photo.
You would be entirely correct to say that feather is more orange-brown than red... but look again at a male Northern Cardinal.

https://cdn.birdwatchingdaily.com/2014/05/male-cardinal.jpg

Zoom way in, and avoid looking at any feathers adjacent to a black feather. Try the breast or upper flank or the side of the neck. (Or the wing coverts, but that's too obvious.) Clear your mind of preconceptions. What color are those feathers? Pinkish-orange. Red-adjacent, but not nearly as red they appear when you can see the black to contrast them with. Assume SLP55's camera adds a bit of brownish cast, and your dilemma should be resolved.

 

[Butty]

What are you saying? That there are red feathers (one red feather?) in the photo? - or that male northern cardinals aren't red? It's a male if there are feathers in the photo that can only have come from a male, and I don't see any.

 

[AveryBartels]

What are you saying? That there are red feathers (one red feather?) in the photo? - or that male northern cardinals aren't red? It's a male if there are feathers in the photo that can only have come from a male, and I don't see any.

I'm guessing your screen is maybe not picking up the colours so well. Looks pretty clear cut red to me. Also worth noting that body feathers always look drabber when it is just a single feather rather than a bunch of overlapping feathers on a bird.

 

[nartreb]

There are a couple of small feathers in the photos that are clearly not wing primaries or tail feathers, and they are much brighter in color (but still orangish-brown) than the tail and wing feathers. Avery called the small feathers "body feathers", but I'm not sure where they're from - they might be coverts.
And I'm also saying that male cardinals' feathers are not nearly as red as one might naively think. There's something about how they're arranged on the live bird that makes them look redder than they do when they're laid out flat.
(thirdly, on the live bird, there's something about our brains that dials up the redness in our memory, compared to just looking at a sample of pixels. That's the zoom-in experiment I was suggesting above. But never mind, let's concentrate on the second point.)
Just look at the photos:
primary - female
primary - male

Would you have guessed that male primaries are blacker than female? Would you call any of those feathers "red"?


tail - female
tail - male


For tail feathers, the male is a little redder (or at least, more rufous) than the female, but neither of them is remotely "red".

I'm not certain, since the differences are not large enough for me to be confident in comparing the linked photos to a BirdForum post taken with a different camera in different light on a different background, but I think both the wing feathers and the tail feathers in the posting at top of thread look more like the male feathers on FeatherAtlas than like the female feathers. The body feathers are clearly not plain brown, buff, or yellowish - the usual colors of a female- so they're a better match for a male. In fairness, you sometimes do see a few quite red body feathers on females, and we've only got two or three body feathers to look at, so we can't quite rule out a female based on body feathers alone, but the probabilities are strongly in favor of male.

It's a male if there are feathers in the photo that can only have come from a male

Might as well say the converse: It's a female if there are feathers that can only have come from a female. Do you see any?

 

[Butty]

I'm guessing your screen is maybe not picking up the colours so well.

Why do people routinely resort to this suggestion when there is any debate about colour? My various screens are just fine, thank you - they show me lots of things that are lovely and red, and these feathers which are rufous/orange/brown/reddish but decidedly not red - and I daresay Mr/Ms Nartreb finds that with his/her screen too, as s/he also sees no red feathers.

body feathers always look drabber when it is just a single feather rather than a bunch of overlapping feathers on a bird

This is a good point. I should be interested in knowing whether male northern cardinal (body) feathers are actually, individually, as red as the bird appears to be.

Might as well say the converse: It's a female if there are feathers that can only have come from a female. Do you see any?

Strange statement. I'm not saying the converse, so why would you offer such a counterfactual assertion? See above to confirm that I have not said, and am not saying, anything about whether or not it's a female. I'm saying there is no proof that it's a male. If one asserts that this is
a male on the basis of feather colour, one needs to isolate feathers that can only have come from a male, and I don't see any.

 

[AveryBartels]

I should be interested in knowing whether male northern cardinal (body) feathers are actually, individually, as red as the bird appears to be.

From my experience, single body feathers pretty universally appear less bright than the corresponding plumage on the bird when looked at in a normal setting - such as these photos. However, my presumption is that what we see in these cases is not really accurate - each filament of the feather is, presumably, just as bright as what we see when looking at the bird. However, as these feathers tend to be pretty loosely textured there is ample room for background (ground, sky, sheet of paper etc.) to "diffuse" the intensity of the colour. If you turn a body feather so you are looking at a shallow angle along the shaft, there will be no background showing through and you will see only feather, and this will make the colour appear more intense (or, you could argue "true"). Indeed, if you zoom in on the second image in this thread, you can see a few feathers that are at such an angle and these appear notably more intensely coloured (regardless of the degree of redness or not-redness one sees).

 

[nartreb]

If one asserts that this is
a male on the basis of feather colour, one needs to isolate feathers that can only have come from a male

One can assert that this is a male on the basis that it being female is very unlikely. Every colored feather we see looks more like a male feather than a female feather, and that goes double for the "body" feathers. I have previously laid out at length the evidence suggesting it is male, and I see no evidence at all to suggest that it is female. Do you? If so, what is that evidence?

 

[Butty]

You do need to re-read - more attentively - what I've already written.

 

[tconzemi]

It looks Cardinal red on my screen