Central Ornithology Publication Office
An ornithological mystery has been solved! Puzzling red feathers have been
popping up in eastern North America's "yellow-shafted" population of
Northern Flickers, but they aren't due to genes borrowed from their
"red-shafted" cousins to the west, according to a new study in The
Auk: Ornithological Advances. Instead, the culprit is a pigment that the
birds are ingesting in the berries of exotic honeysuckle plants.
The Northern Flicker comes in two varieties--the birds of the west have a
salmon pink or orange tinge to the undersides of their wings, while the eastern
birds are yellow. Where the two populations meet in the middle, they frequently
hybridize, producing birds with a blend of both colors. For years, however,
flickers far to the east of the hybrid zone have been popping up with
red-orange wing feathers. The prevailing explanation has been that they must
somehow have genes from the western population, but Jocelyn Hudon of the Royal
Alberta Museum and his colleagues have determined that the eastern birds'
unusual color actually has a different source: a pigment called rhodoxanthin,
which comes from the berries of two species of invasive honeysuckle plants.
Hudon and his colleagues used spectrophotometry and chromatography to show
that rhodoxanthin, rather than the type of carotenoid pigment that colors
western red-shafted birds, was present in the feathers of yellow-shafted
flicker specimens with the aberrant red coloration. Data from a bird-banding
station helped confirm that the birds acquire the red pigment during their fall
molt about early August, which coincides with the availability of ripe
honeysuckle berries. The honeysuckles have also been implicated as the source
of unusual orange feathers in Cedar Waxwings.
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