Humans aren’t the only ones with a capacity for compassion and wanting to help others. Apparently, birds don’t mind feeding the hungry either. While cardinals are one of the most beautiful and boldly colored birds that we see in the wild, some of them are also charitable.
A black-headed cardinal’s charitable act was caught on video which has gone viral on YouTube with more than 265,000 views.
The video is actually rare in two ways. It’s somewhat rare to see a black-headed cardinal, which is actually a regular cardinal that’s gone bald from molting and/or skin mites, according to Farm and Dairy. Birds can’t preen themselves on the head so this why their head feather disappears but, according to the Tusla Audubon Society, they grow back in a month or so.
“Most birds become secretive and less active while molting, so we don’t see them very often in this condition,” Ornithologist Chris Thompson told the website. “Since we don’t often see actively molting birds, we perceive the condition as rare, although it’s probably just rarely seen.”
The second reason that this video is rare is that it catches a cardinal in the act of feeding. However, the bird isn’t feeding its young… it’s feeding some local goldfish!
“This is a black-headed cardinal that visits our yard pond,” the video’s caption reads. “We have several goldfish that live in this pond and the cardinal feeds the fish as many as 6 times a day. The cardinal’s head is completely bald.”
National Geographic asked some scientists why they think this occurred and they had a few theories.
“My best guess is that the appearance of the goldfish’s open mouth at the surface of the water is just similar enough in size and shape to the open mouth of a baby bird that it triggers the instinct in the adult bird to provide food to it,” Princeton biologist Christina Riehl told National Geographic.
Another theory was that the bird just lost its own young and was trying redirect its parental behavior onto the fish.
It was theorized that the bird may have also been drawn to the bright colored mouths of the fish.
“It’s an amazing demonstration of how simple stimuli can trigger very hardwired behaviors, even in situations that seem obviously wrong to us,” Riehl said.
Apparently, this isn’t the first occurrence of a cardinal feeding a fish. LIFE Nature Library published a photo of the cardinal feeding a goldfish in the 1960s.
Science people can say what they want but we’re going to pretend that this was a benevolent cardinal who just likes hanging out with fish and bringing them snacks.
Watch the video below and decide for yourself.
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