It’s that time of year again.<\/p>\n
The internet is clogged with photographs of hideous\u00a0northern cardinals<\/strong><\/a>, the feathers of their heads all gone to reveal\u00a0wrinkled 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.<\/p>\n A quick internet search turns up what I believe is the first published report<\/a> of this now familiar phenomenon, from the pen of none other than George Sutton<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n I wanted the specimen. After a rather difficult chase I succeeded in getting him, and soon discovered the cause of his gray-headed appearance.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The bird was a male\u00a0northern cardinal<\/strong>, 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.”<\/p>\n 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\u00a0mites. That isn’t necessarily true.<\/p>\n