Don’t Panic If a Bald Bird Shows Up in Your Garden — There’s Actually a Surprising Reason for It

Plumage is one of the most striking features that a birder notices as they watch from the glass of their kitchen window or a porch railing. As if masterpieces of art, the plumages burst from the bodies of birds like brushstrokes of vivid greens, blues, reds, and purples, often highlighted by comblike and streaky patterns that outline the crests. But time and time again, birders have observed something unusual about these birds’ plumages. For instance, in early 2024, a Reddit user (u/InstructionNext6861) from Dubai shared some pictures of a myna they spotted while walking to their car.

While the myna’s feathers were typical and puffy black, its yellow head seemed to shed its hair. People hilariously likened the bald myna to a baby vulture and the Plague Doctor’s mask. But if you ask the experts, this is not something to worry about. It is, in fact, quite normal for bird-keepers to spot their bird visitors donning a bald head. The reason is not that these feathery friends just came out of a salon with a scraggly mohawk hairstyle or ran an electric shaver over their bodies to trim the hairs. The reason is a natural process called “molting.”

According to the National Audubon Society, molting is a seasonal phenomenon among birds when they shed their feathers to make way for new feathers. Between the duration when old feathers have fallen and new ones haven’t grown, the bird’s appearance goes through a phase when they have no feathers on the head while the rest of the body displays regular plumage. The molt, typically, is observed in birds like Northern cardinals, blue jays, North American songbirds, Townsend’s Warblers, Tree Swallows, Scarlet Tanagers, young sandpipers, hummingbirds, and others.

For birds like crows and ravens, the molting season can be a little rougher than the others. According to World Bird Sanctuary (@wbsstl), “When crows and ravens molt, they tend to molt most of their face feathers all at once. They will also molt their body feathers fairly heavily, which gives them a patchy look.” During the molt season, many of the birds, including Anna’s hummingbird and juvenile red-shouldered hawks, display symmetrical patterns, per the National Wildlife Federation. On the other side, birds like penguins and goldfinches typically show non-symmetrical molt patterns like pillowy or splotchy crests.

David Wiedenfeld, conservation scientist for American Bird Conservancy, shared with Birds & Blooms, molting usually occurs between the breeding season and migration season, which is during fall, and sometimes in spring. But when it happens in spring, the molting doesn’t involve the shedding of head feathers. “Most of the time, the big molt for almost all of our birds occurs in late summer. It could start in July, but it tends to be later. It tends to be August and into early September, but different birds are different,” he explained.

However, the shedding of feathers from the head does not always imply that the bird is in the molting phase. The new haircut could be due to environmental factors like feather mites or nutritional deficiencies. But the most common reason for it is indeed molting. “It’s not very common to see a wild bird that’s gotten a bad enough infestation of mites that it’s lost enough feathers to really look bad, and usually birds that get a high infestation of mites are very sick,” said Wiedenfeld. Though if a birder spots molting in their birds during the month of August, it is very normal, he added.