Unusual colour variation of the common rosefinch Carpodacus erythrinus observed

Abstract

In 2019, a male Common Rosefinch Carpodacus erythrinus was observed and photographed in the Naturerlebnisraum Laboer Dünen/PLÖ, Schleswig-Holstein after it was ringed there in the previous year. In 2018, it was identified as a second calendar-year bird with olive plumage. In its third calendar year (2019) we expected the bird to have a rosy carmine head, throat and upper breast, but actually it had pale orange feathers. Roland Neumann has been studying Common Rosefinches at the Baltic Coast of Mecklenburg for almost two decades and he has seen this plumage colour only rarely. Males of this orange colouration should be most likely in their third calendar year, although he also recorded a bird that was orange for at least two years and turned red only in the third year, and according to Svensson (1992) this colouration rarely occurs in second calendar-year males as well.