Photo of a Red-bellied woodpecker (Melanerpes Carolinus) that doesn’t have a red-bellied (who names birds?) on the lookout for some bugs to eat. To be fair, there was a bird already named Red-Headed Woodpecker, and it has a tiny orange patch near its feet.
Some of you might be wondering if it’s an orange feathered patch and why it is called the Red-bellied Woodpecker vs. the Orange-Bellied Woodpecker. Here’s a fun fact about the history of the word Orange, the word Orange didn’t exist in the English language until the 13th century. However the name refers to the fruit, Orange; the color Orange didn’t get its own word until the 15th century. It was referred to as red or yellow-red before changing into Orange. This is why robin redbreast is called red vs. orange in England, it was named before there was a word for the color Orange.
The second fun fact is most ancient languages/cultures did not have a word for the color blue, it was lumped into green, or the old language described colors as Light or Dark vs. spectrum.
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Thank you for the very interesting background information, I had no idea!
There’s a whole history to colors, that’s just fascinating to me.