
“How adorable!!!!! I can’t wait to get my new bird feeder up with a camera,” another wrote.

Experts say while there are millions of red cardinals, there are only 10-15 yellow cardinals in North America. The rare coloring is reportedly because the mutation in the yellow cardinal blocks the red pigment in most cardinals DNA and replaces it with the bright yellow. Geoffrey Hill, a professor and curator of birds at Auburn University, told USA Today in 2019 that only three yellow cardinal sightings are reported a year, which makes seeing one a ‘one-in-a-million’ finding.

Last year, a Florida nature photographer spotted one of the elusive birds in Gainesville in a wooded area of the University of Florida campus.

There have been a few yellow cardinal sightings in recent years, including in Port St. Lucie in 2019 when a bird named ‘Sunny’ was spotted in a photographer’s backyard. Others have been reported in Alabama and Georgia.

