Rare 'one-in-a-million' yellow cardinal spotted on Christmas Eve
Credit: Catherine Reddick
HARRIMAN, Tenn. - A photographer in Tennessee recently came across an extremely rare yellow cardinal in her backyard during the holiday season.
Catherine Reddick, of Harriman, first spotted the gorgeous bird on Dec. 4, but she only had her cellphone to snap a quick, grainy picture.
Then on Christmas Eve, the sun-colored cardinal – which has now been named Woodstock – returned to her backyard. Reddick took a better photo with her DSLR camera and posted it to a Facebook birding group where it went viral.
At last check, her photo racked up over 15,000 likes and nearly 2,000 shares.
"I didn't know there were yellow cardinals! Beautiful," wrote one viewer.
"How adorable!!!!! I can’t wait to get my new bird feeder up with a camera," another wrote.
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Experts say while there are millions of red cardinals, there are only 10-15 yellow cardinals in North America. The rare coloring is reportedly because the mutation in the yellow cardinal blocks the red pigment in most cardinals DNA and replaces it with the bright yellow. Geoffrey Hill, a professor and curator of birds at Auburn University, told USA Today in 2019 that only three yellow cardinal sightings are reported a year, which makes seeing one a 'one-in-a-million' finding.
Last year, a Florida nature photographer spotted one of the elusive birds in Gainesville in a wooded area of the University of Florida campus.
There have been a few yellow cardinal sightings in recent years, including in Port St. Lucie in 2019 when a bird named ‘Sunny’ was spotted in a photographer's backyard. Others have been reported in Alabama and Georgia.