Since yesterday’s post was a male Northern Cardinal, I thought it only appropriate to show you a female Northern Cardinal. The males are bright red while the females are more brownish grey with some orange highlights. Both birds were photographed at the Pedernales Falls State Park bird blind. I wrote a story about the origin of the park a few days ago. It’s one of my favorite places to photograph birds. This particular bird had just bathed in the bird bath and was drying off. That’s why she’s all fluffy. She also scored some suet from the suet feeder and failed to clean off her beak…
I’ve often wondered why male birds are more colorful than female birds. So, I did some research to find out what the scientific community thought about this. It is a fact that male birds are more colorful or ornamented than females in most, but not all, bird species. The most supported theory is that female birds are attracted to the brighter colors but other scientists theorize that duller colors in females allow them to be more conspicuous and less visible to predators while incubating their young. Perhaps its a combination of the two theories. The best article that I found was written by Scientific American. There are many more theories in the writeup. You can access it by clicking here.
This image was taken with my Canon EOS 5DS using my Sigma 150-600mm f/5-6.3 Sports Lens set on 600 mm. The camera was set on Aperture priority mode with the aperture set at f/6.3, shutter speed at 1/250 and the ISO set at 1600. This is a single image processed in Adobe Lightroom.
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© 2016 T. Kahler Photography
