This is a scene out of the kitchen window of my house in suburbia. It arrested my eye when I happened to glance out, and I grabbed my camera to capture the shot. (Note, this is shot through two panes of, ahem, dirty glass, and the zoom is set to its absolute maximum. Also, the unrelenting gray skies of recent days did not offer the best lighting for capturing color. Still, I tried.) We have several feeders in our backyard, filled with safflower seed. It's a bit more expensive than regular bird seed, but it is not much liked by starlings -- the motorcycle gang of feeder visitors -- and it is apparently liked by the rest of the winged kingdom (as well as by squirrels and chipmunks). There are times when I've counted nine cardinals in the cypress tree in our yard, all waiting their turn at the feeders. Notice the mottling on this cardinal. I would normally attribute these whitish patches to the inadequacy of my camera and the lighting conditions, but I have seen this particular cardinal in our yard frequently this winter. It is truly colored that way. Perhaps this is what is termed leucistic, in which pigment is not evenly distributed, though I don't tread confidently into this kind of science. This coloration is sometimes called "pied" which means having two different colors. The Pied Piper of Hamlin got that name, supposedly, from the color of his clothes, not his own pigment distribution. The word "piebald" could also apply, though it generally refers to a combination of black and white. Flike is piebald. The "bald" part is an old word for "white" which is how the bald eagle got its name -- from its white head. Missouri calendar:

• The Missouri Natural Events Calendar is blank for today.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 28th, 2010 at 1:01 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.