Turkey With Patterned Tail Feathers Coloring Page

Nine tall feathers rise behind a front facing turkey, and every one of them has been divided into two or three bands by a curved line drawn across it. That turns the fan into roughly twenty four separate compartments. The bird itself has been deliberately left plain, with a simple oval body, a small beak and two feet, so nothing competes with the pattern above.

Treat the fan as a color exercise rather than a picture of a bird. Repeating a three color sequence across all nine feathers produces a woven look, while giving each feather its own family of one color from light at the base to dark at the tip produces something closer to a real display. There is also a straightforward math activity hiding here for a child who has just met fractions, since every feather is split into halves or thirds.

A displaying tom fans between eighteen and twenty tail feathers, always an odd number of quills either side of a center one. The banding drawn on this sheet is a stylized version of a real feature, because wild turkey tail feathers genuinely are barred across their width.