Bird watchers are flocking to a small Alabama city this week to catch a glimpse of a cardinal with a one-in-a-million genetic mutation that causes its bright red feathers to be a striking shade of yellow.
Alabaster resident Charlie Stephenson first noticed the unusual feathered creature in her backyard bird feeder in late January and posted about it on Facebook.
“I thought ‘well there’s a bird I’ve never seen before,’” said Stephenson, who’s been birdwatching for decades, AL.com reported. “Then I realized it was a cardinal… and it was a yellow cardinal.”
The special bird is still around, stopping by the bird feeder at least once a day, Stephenson said.
On Feb. 19, Jeremy Black, a professional photographer who is friends with Stephenson, saw her post and asked if he could come to her backyard to shoot the bird.
After about five hours of waiting he was able to capture the flaxen fowl in an image, which has since racked up close to 800 reactions and been shared over 500 times.
“As soon as it landed, I was starstruck,” Black told National Geographic. “It kind of took my breath away a little bit.”
Auburn University biology professor Geoffrey Hill, who’s written books on bird coloration, said that the creature’s mutation is so rare he’s never seen one in person.
“I’ve been birdwatching in the range of cardinals for 40 years, and I’ve never seen a yellow bird in the wild,” he said.
Hill estimates that only two or three yellow cardinals visit backyards in the US or Canada every year.
Cardinals and other songbirds need to consume foods containing organic pigments called carotenoids to achieve their bright colors.
“Songbirds like cardinals almost never consume red pigments; rather they consume abundant yellow pigments,” Hill said. “So to be red, cardinals have to biochemically convert yellow pigments to red.”
But this bird’s singular mutation might be blocking the color-changing pathway, diluting its red pigment to yellow, he explained.
Stephenson said she didn’t realize how rare the bird was when she first saw it.
“I’m used to being a birder and to see some albino ones,” she said. “But I thought this was something else and then I learned how rare it is.”