Then, a century later, Audubon's journal entry proved true again when a different batch of oddly colored Flickers came to puzzle the world's naturalists. He didn't know it at the time, but Audubon had stumbled into the Northern Flicker hybrid zone, where Red-shafted Flickers from the West breed with Yellow-shafted Flickers from the East, producing offspring with salmon pink-shafted flight feathers, the intermediate color reflecting their combined genetic lineages. The five birds, all Northern Flickers, varied dramatically in color-some had flight feathers adorned with yellow, others with red, and still others landed somewhere in between. In 1843, as John James Audubon made his way up the Missouri River to Yellowstone, he came upon a group of woodpeckers “which I think will puzzle all the naturalists in the world,” he wrote.
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