Hey? You know that bird?? The one that is trans? The one on your blog, can you show me that bird again, or like pictures of examples of how birds change plumage and go from female to male? I cannot seem to find many pictures online :(
image id: an eclectus parrot with a mostly green head, dappled with some red feathers, red feathers tipped with green on the neck, a half-plucked blue chest and abdomen, blue ventral wings, dark red wing feathers tipped with green, light eyes with wide dark pupils, and a black bill with the upper mandible streaked yellow and orange. there are some grey and white down feathers sticking out on her wings and chest from plucking. the other two images are pictures of the same bird, one a more zoomed out shot from a different angle, and one a close-up headshot. end id
the best pics of her i could find
image id: an eclectus parrot with a mostly red head, a green forehead and crown, a green chest dappled with blue, red patches underneath the wings, dark red wings with some green feathers, blue flight feathers, brown eyes, the upper mandible of the bill orange and yellow with a small streak of black, and a black lower bill mandible. end id
here’s another example of an eclectus parrot with marbled male/female plumage, his name’s atlas and he belongs to u/midgetcanadian iirc on reddit! this pic is from a long time ago actually, he’s gone fully green with regular male colouration and was dna tested to be male. he’s essentially the opposite case of the bird i work with, whereas she spent the first 15-odd years of her life with regular female colouration and started turning green after she bonded with an african grey we presumed to be male. that african grey has since passed away four-ish months ago, so we’ll see if his absence has any effect on her plumage.
image id: two eclectus parrots, one male and one female. the male is mostly vibrant green, with patches of red under his wings, blue flight feathers, dark eyes, an orange and yellow top bill mandible and black lower mandible. the female has a bright red head and neck and darker red wings with a blue chest and body, blue on the ventral side of the wings, light eyes, and a fully black bill. end id
this is an example of regular male/female colouration (apart from the few red feathers on the male’s neck). they’re very distinguishable, so much so that ornithologists thought they were different species for years.
switching to different sexes like this actually isn’t unheard of in birds. sometimes, when a hen’s ovaries stop working for whatever reason, she will start behaving more like a cock, and if the species is sexually dimorphic, begin to appear like one, too. bird sex is a lot more fluid than human sex is as they have a completely different chromosomal system (Z and W chromosomes as opposed to humans’ X and Y), and birds can actually control the sex of their chicks if need be. zebra finches, for example, will begin producing more females if the flock is having a difficult time, and kookaburras always tend to hatch a male before a female.
it’s actually not super rare for female birds to suddenly “become” males when their sex organs stop working. this is especially common in domestic chickens, ducks, peafowl, but that’s likely just because it’s a lot easier to monitor them and take notice of when it’s happening. but why do birds never seem to change from males to females? it’s because, like how a humans’ default sex is female, all birds’ default sex is male. so it’s not like a bird has never been born intersex and had characteristics of both sexes/changed appearance from male to female over time, it’s just a lot more rare, since when a female’s defining female trait (ovaries) stops working, sometimes their bodies then default to male and a hen chicken would grow large, ornamental tail feathers, grow larger combs, and begin crowing. when a bird’s ovaries stop working, they stop producing oestrogen, and so they take on more male traits as a default. sometimes they develop testes as well, and there’s even been a case of a previously female bird siring viable offspring as a male. some birds have even been found to be gynandromorphic, where their secondary sex characteristics (plumage, flesh/beak colouration, fat distribution, etc) are split male/female neatly down the middle of their bodies.
so does this mean that millie (the first eclectus) is trans? yes and no, but mostly no. in a human sense, millie would not be trans, primarily because birds have no sense of gender. obviously this doesn’t mean she’s “cis” either; she just is. to call her trans would be gross anthropomorphism, which is ideally to be avoided at all costs when it comes to real life animals. however, as long as you’re aware that sex is a very complicated matter and that she’s not truly trans in the human understanding of it, i don’t see an issue with casually referring to millie and any other female-male birds as trans! we don’t fully understand what’s going on with millie in regards to her ovaries/testes and hormones, because as much as universities and labs want to study her, we don’t want to stress her more than is strictly necessary, and since her partner died, we won’t be handing her off to some scientist anytime soon. all we know is that millie is somewhere between male and female, and it’s not the rarest thing in the world that she seems to be switching from female to male. but in the case of atlas, the second eclectus above, his case was likely just a result of confused hormones while he was young, as he’s got entirely normal male characteristics now, and he was very young (1-2 years i believe) while he was marbled like that.
so yeah, bird sex is a very interesting thing to study and i am very lucky to have such a great example of sex switching in birds right at my own aviary!
(just as a side note: millie is unusual for two reasons! one is her sex switch, and the other is the fact that she bonded with an african grey like she did. parrots are very social animals and most of them form bonds for life, most parrots being monogamous and forming strong emotional bonds with their partners, african greys included, but eclectuses are the only exception to this. they are the only parrot species that isn’t monogamous; a female will mate with many different males over their lives, and males can tend to many different females at once. females will stay in their nest hollows for at least six months straight of the year, depending entirely on her many mates to bring her food, and males will spend all day every day bringing food to various females. millie was a strange outlier for bonding so closely to her mate, but very unfortunately he passed away from undetected cancer a few months ago. millie has been living with a volunteer since then as to reduce stress. you can partially see her mate standing on the same perch as her off to the side of the second pic.)
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