Video: Rose-breasted Grosbeak

[Donkees]

You can imagine my delight at capturing this video portrait of a singing male Rose-breasted Grosbeak. What's more, he's a very pretty specimen! The male's lilting musical carol has been compared to the song of "a Robin who took singing lessons."

© 2010 Lang Elliott
musicofnature.org

[Nictuku]

1. I had one visit my yard once

A rare sight! Beautiful birds. I have a lot of Black Headed Grossbeaks, and only once in 10 years have I see the Rose-breasted.

[Donkees]

2. I saw one last Spring and didn't know what it was :)

[Diamond_Dog]

3. My husband captured this one at our bird feeder

and I have not seen him back for about a year. Their songs do bring me great joy. Lovely birds. Thank you!

[Donkees]

4. Nice Photo! Researchers in Pennsylvania found a grosbeak that was half male and half female

Researchers trapped this rose-breasted grosbeak at Powdermill Nature Reserve in September. Its yellow side is female, and its red side is male—a conditional called bilateral gynandromorphy.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ANNIE LINDSAY

BYJASON BITTEL
PUBLISHED OCTOBER 9, 2020


Excerpt:

Researchers with a team monitoring bird populations at Powdermill Nature Reserve, in Rector, Pennsylvania, netted a surprise on September 24: a rose-breasted grosbeak with bizarre coloring. It had the bright scarlet feathers of a male grosbeak on one side of its body and the canary yellow plumage of a female on the other.

When they saw the robin-size songbird’s split coloring, it was immediately clear that the grosbeak was what scientists call a bilateral gynandromorph—an animal that appears half male and half female.

“There was no question about it,” says Annie Lindsay, bird banding program manager at Powdermill. Measurements also revealed that the bird’s right wing was slightly longer than the left, typical of the difference between male and female grosbeaks.

While gynandromorphy simply means that an animal has both female and male characteristics, bilateral gynandromorphs often appear more dramatically different because those characteristics are separated down the middle of their body; the separation may be internal as well as external. And bilateral gynandromorphy is different from hermaphrodism, in which an organism has both male and female reproductive organs but may appear on the outside to be either male or female.

In fact, since Powdermill began keeping records nearly six decades ago, Lindsay says, only five of roughly 800,000 captured birds have been documented as likely gynandromorphs. The only other bird with bilateral gynandromorphy Lindsay says she’s seen during the past 15 years was also a rose-breasted grosbeak.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/rose-breasted-grosbeak-half-male-half-female