It’s that time of year again.
The internet is clogged with photographs of hideous northern cardinals, the feathers of their heads all gone to reveal wrinkled bluish skin. There’s a thriving cottage e-industry in reassuring observers that it’s temporary, that these truly are cardinals, that they’ll be fine once they’ve grown a new feather suit later this summer.
A quick internet search turns up what I believe is the first published report of this now familiar phenomenon, from the pen of none other than George Sutton. The fifteen-year-old was collecting in central Texas in the summer of 1913 when he came across “a new thing” in a tangle of wild grapes.
I wanted the specimen. After a rather difficult chase I succeeded in getting him, and soon discovered the cause of his gray-headed appearance.
The bird was a male northern cardinal, all the feathers of its head gone but the rest of the plumage, though “slightly worn,” “rather neat [in] appearance.” Sutton called the bird a “vulture cardinal,” and asked the opinion of other “bird-men” about the origin of the bird’s odd condition, whether a pathology or “simply some exceptionally narrow escape.”
The usual explanation offered nowadays, more than a century later, is that these vulture cardinals have scratched themselves bald in the attempt to be rid of an especially bad infestation of mites. That isn’t necessarily true.
Thirty years after Sutton’s original report, Josselyn van Tyne returned to the question, observing a male northern cardinal of known age that suddenly, in its (at least) eighth year, had gone completely bald by July 3. Van Tyne noted no
indication of parasites or disease, and the bird’s behavior was normal. Its appearance, though rather repulsive, apparently did not interfere with nesting….
Next summer, the bird “remained perfectly normal in appearance.” As will yours, once it’s gone through a nice refreshing molt.
