The cyclical season of molting is upon us

Have you ever noticed how even some of our prettiest birds can look a little “ratty” this time of year? 

 

By ratty I mean missing some of their feathers, less colorful, or even mangy, to use a more familiar term. Molting is a bird’s seasonal cycle of shedding old feathers and replacing them with new ones. It is typically seen in late summer, after the peak breeding season and before migratory birds start their long fall journeys to their wintering grounds.

 

Molts can be either partial or full, depending on the species of birds involved. Many of our local songbirds perform partial molts each summer. If a bird like the pictured cardinal was to molt fully, he would be unable to fly. In that case, he would have a very difficult time eating, evading predators and just staying alive.

 

Examples of birds that do molt fully are ducks and geese, and they actually become flightless during their molting periods. But since they can hide, eat, drink and evade predators in their preferred marshy habitats, a couple of weeks of flightlessness is generally something that waterfowl can survive. This time is also when many biologists and volunteers band together and release great numbers of waterfowl by firing large nets over flocks of the grounded birds.

 

For the last couple of summers we have had quite a few molting birds come visit our home. The two most conspicuous were a male northern cardinal and a male red-winged blackbird. These birds could obviously still fly since they were still making it up to the bird feeder. And one might not even

notice the missing feathers and slightly ragged appearance of the birds’ bodies. But, oh, their heads and faces were cringeworthy!

 

The blackbird had what appeared to be a black “hoodie” on that came about to his ears. From under that protruded a featherless face that gave the bird an almost menacing look. And the cardinal was a genuine spectacle. With basically no feathers on his face and black skin underneath, he looked a bit like Zorro in his mask, except that he had a small red mohawk atop his head. A couple of our prettiest birds looked absolutely nothing like themselves as they worked through their annual feather replacement. In fact, if one didn’t know about molting, one might assume these birds were sick.

 

Now that we have some understanding of the molting process, perhaps we can use this knowledge to help manage our own. My molting, for example, has become a year-round process that I would love to end, and, sadly, there don’t appear to be any replacement feathers in sight!