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Male and Female Birds


On this Birds' Nest, both male and female bring food for the chicks. You can see the male and female are of different colours. The female (on the right) has brown feathers, whereas the male (left) has black feathers. This sort of thing, the difference in male and female, is known as "Sexual Dimorphism", and there's a description on Wikipedia with much more striking examples at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_dimorphism

Here's a more basic example...

Male and Female birds different

If you're wondering how we know which of the parents is the mother and which is the father, the evidence is there in earlier observations of the Birds' Nest where it's a reasonable guess that it was the female that was sitting on the nest when the eggs appeared! Therefore, the female is the one with the brown feathers.