A longtime birdwatcher in Pennsylvania had what he called a “once-in-a-lifetime” bird sighting — a rare cardinal that appeared to be half male and half female.
“I had a once-in-a-lifetime, one in a million bird encounter!” said James Hill, who described the bird, known as a bilateral gynandromorph northern cardinal, as “a bird divided right down the middle, half male and half female.”
He got the homeowner’s permission to snap pictures of it.
Hill, citing National Geographic and Daniel Hooper, a postdoctoral fellow at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in 2019, said gynandromorphs, called “half-siders,” are rare but known.
“They likely occur across all species of birds,” Hooper told National Geographic, “but we’re only likely to notice them in species where the adult males and females look distinct from each other.”
