Half-Male, Half-Female Northern Cardinal Bird Spotted In Pennsylvania

A birdwatcher in Pennsylvania said he was bewitched by the sighting of a rare half-male half-female northern cardinal bird recently.

Jamie Hill, a birdwatcher for 48 years, called it a "once-in-a-lifetime" experience in a Facebook post in which he documented the unusual sighting Sunday.

"Annette Smith and I were able to see, and I was able to photograph, this extremely rare, bilateral gynandromorph Northern Cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis)," the post read.

The bird came to feed in one of the feeders laid by Smith’s mother near Grand Valley in Warren County. It was bright red on one side, which is typical of male cardinals, and brownish white like its female counterpart on the other, which implied the specimen may be a mix of the two sexes.

At first, Hill wrote wondered if the bird was leucistic — a term which signifies the creature would have a lack of pigmentation in its features — but later recognized it as a bilateral gynandromorph, which means one side of it is male while the other is female.

He said the bird has both a functioning ovary and a single testis. "Theoretically, this bird could either mate with a normal male cardinal and lay fertile eggs, or it could mate with a normal female cardinal and father her eggs!" Hill wrote in the post.

"During our 1-hour stay, the bird came to the feeders only once (with 5 other cardinals), but thankfully it perched out in the open briefly in two other trees and I was able to shoot about 50 images," Hill wrote in the post.

Hill told the BBC that being able to photograph it was "once-in-a-lifetime, one-in-a-million encounter."

The Facebook post shows the bird perched on a tree as it blithely looks around.