The Colorful Language of Birding
In any field, using a shared vocabulary is essential to the cohesive and effective communication of ideas. In chemistry, there are standards of how to name chemicals and describe their characteristics. In cooking, there is an understanding of what it means to knead a dough versus fold it, or what it means to sauté, steam, or sear a dish in a pan. In birding, one key to identifying birds is in describing the plumage, or the overall appearance of a bird’s feathers. While other characteristics like the size and shape of certain feathers or patches of feathers can be very distinctive, the most common way to describe plumage is by color pattern.
Interestingly, color is a notoriously difficult concept to describe with language. Some of this complication can be attributed to the complex way that humans perceive color, the diverse way that color comes from the mixing of varying intensities of light in different hues as they excite the color receptors of our retinas, and the way that light reflects and refracts through different materials such that different lighting conditions can change the way that we see the same object.
Much of the confusion about the meanings behind color names is inherent to the relationship between human language and meaning, where the perception of a concept influences a person’s description of it, and the names of concepts influence others’ perceptions of those concepts. For example, consider the phrase “redhead” to describe those with ginger hair color. The term has been in use since at least 1510, but isn’t it odd that it describes a color that is more orange than red? The English word “orange” was first used to describe the citrus fruit in the 1300s, likely adapted from the Old French word “orenge,” which ultimately comes from the Sanskrit “naranga” meaning “orange tree.” It wasn’t until the 1500s that orange was used to describe the color. It turns out that prior to the use of “orange” to describe the color between yellow and red, objects in that range of hue were simply referred to as “yellow-red” or “red,” such as “redheads.”
Let us not overlook that many people have some degree of color confusion or color blindness. In fact, one in ten males are estimated to be born with some form of color deficiency. Even among color-seeing creatures, humans are somewhat limited in color perception. We are unable to describe colors others may be able to see because we cannot sense UV radiation, unlike many birds!
When I started birding, I thought I had a leg up because I had a background in art and design, and already had familiarity with names of colors outside of “red,” “orange,” or even hyphenated colors like “teal-green.” I had words like “cerulean,” “periwinkle,” or “chartreuse” in my arsenal, perhaps color names most people have only seen on crayons or on custom T-shirt sites. Armed with these linguistic tools, I was convinced that identifying birds would be a breeze.
Boy, was I wrong.
I mean it definitely helps to know what “iridescent” describes, or how “cinnamon” and “peach” may differ, but imagine my surprise when I opened a field guide and saw the same unfamiliar color names over and over. Kudos to you if you’re already familiar with any of the following: “buffy,” “rufous,” “tawny,” and “russet.”
When I finally looked up what all these color names meant, I realized why they were so commonly used. They all referred to some type of brown, a color family familiar to birders of any experience level. When a flying bird flashes through your field of vision and all you can remember is its color, distinctive language can help you determine what species of bird you are looking at, or even its sex.
To start, birds are often described as “buffy,” referring to the pale, yellowy-brown color of buff leather. This seems simple enough. It describes leather made from an early type of wild cattle commonly known as a “buffe” until it became extinct in the early 1600s. Less sturdy leather was then prepared in a similar fashion from domestic cattle, and was also called “buff” and possibly mistakenly called “buffalo” (not unlike how American Bison were also mistakenly called “buffalo”). Strangely, this leather was often not only whitened to a pale yellow, called “white buff,” but also dyed brown or black into “brown buff” or “black buff,” implying that buff referred not to the color, but the material itself.
Personally, I find it easier to remember this yellow-brown color as the color of Sarah Michelle Gellar’s blonde hair while she starred as the title role in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Otherwise, it becomes a matter of familiarizing myself with its use in birding. In bird guides, I’ve seen “buffy” used to describe the patches of feathers of an otherwise-white Cattle Egret, the outer wing patches of the Long-eared Owl, and the whiskers of the Lincoln’s Sparrow.
Another word I’ve heard a lot is “rufous,” which is a deep reddish brown color, derived from the Latin word rufus, meaning “reddish.” This color can be seen in most of the plumage of the Rufous Hummingbird and Rufous Night-Heron, the breast of the familiar Eastern Bluebird, and the chest band of a female Belted Kingfisher!
If you shift that color to more orange than rufous, and make it brighter, then you’ve got “tawny,” which is a light orangey-brown color. This name also comes from leather, but in this case, it is more straightforward. “Tawny” means tan-colored, from the Anglo-Norman word “tauné” which goes back to the Medieval Latin word “tannum,” meaning “crushed oak bark,” which is used in the process of tanning leather. This color is used in the name of the Tawny Owl, which describes one of its two color morphs, the other of which is grey. It is also in the name of the Tawny-shouldered Blackbird, which is an important trait for identification when distinguishing from other glossy black-all-over birds like the Red-winged Blackbird and Yellow-shouldered Blackbird.
From tawny, we take a few steps of desaturation toward a deep brown color that is more orangey than rufous. This color, “russet,” is used to describe the browning rough patches of the skins of fruits like apples and pears. It is used to describe the crown of a male Russet Sparrow, and the back of one of the morphs of the Swainson’s Thrush (Russet-backed vs. Olive-backed).
From an artist’s perspective, this is how I would organize these colors in relation to each other using the Hue-Saturation-Value system (HSV, or HSL—Hue-Saturation-Light).
With increasing Hue degree (from more Red to more Yellow)
Rufous
Tawny
Russet
Buffy
With increasing Saturation level (from more dull or gray to more bright)
Buffy
Russet
Rufous
Tawny
With increasing Value level (from more dark or black to more light or white)
Russet
Rufous
Tawny
Buffy
But what about other color systems, like Red-Green-Blue (RGB), Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Black (CMYK), or Lightness-green to red-blue to yellow (LAB)? Ultimately, the verbiage of color theory and different color spaces is an inexact science, as is birdwatching. Attention to the breeding or wintering seasonality of a bird’s plumage, the lighting conditions of observation, and even whether the individual bird is soaked in water should be considered when analyzing your color perception of a bird’s feathers. Fortunately, color is only one component of bird identification. In the context of overall color patterning, overall size and shape, habitat, and distinctive behaviors, color can be a powerful (but not end-all-be-all) tool to contribute to confirming or ruling out your bird identification.
What are some interesting color names you’ve seen used to describe birds? Have you heard any of the ones mentioned in this post before? Send us your comments through our contact page and stay tuned for more tips and tricks to up your birding game!