A longtime bird watcher in Pennsylvania, USA, had the “once in a lifetime” experience of seeing a rare species of cardinal with a “half-male, half-female” appearance.
“I had a once-in-a-lifetime encounter, one in a million birds! James Hill said. The bird he saw and filmed was called a northern cardinal and it had the trait of “gynandromorphism”, or “a bird divided into two in the middle, half male and the other half female”.
Typically, male cardinals have bright red fur, while females are gray-brown, Hill said. This bird has the two halves mentioned above.
Looking at the photo, the color of the surface of the bird’s body changes completely as there is a line on the front part of the body, the red right half of the body being characteristic of the male, the brown left half being a characteristic of children.
Hill, who has been raising birds for 48 years, heard about the bird from a friend of the owner where the bird was discovered. He said the bird was “behaving quite normally” and showed no sex during the observation period. In theory, however, he says he can mate with a female or a male, depending on which of his hormones is active during mating season.
In January 2019, a bird with an almost similar description was confirmed in the area. Since the probability of occurrence of such birds is very low, it is believed that these two sighted birds are the same individual.
According to Daniel Hooper, postdoctoral fellow at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, this “half-man, half-woman” phenomenon is rare but well known. And they can appear on any bird, but humans can only notice in species where adult males and females appear distinct from each other.
Hooper also says that this cardinal bird may indeed be fertile, since the left half of the bird is female and only the left ovary of this bird is active.
According to the journal Natural History, gynandromorphism in birds can occur when the egg that the bird develops has two different sex chromosomes instead of just one. While there are very few examples of half-male and half-female birds, the most recent find was a pink-breasted condor with the right half of the male and the left half of the female in September 2020.
