Robert Ridgway was an American ornithologist specializing in systematics. He was appointed in 1880 by Spencer Fullerton Baird, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, to be the first full-time curator of birds at the United States National Museum, a title he held until his death. In 1883, he helped found the American Ornithologists' Union, where he served as officer and journal editor. Ridgway was an outstanding descriptive taxonomist, capping his life work with The Birds of North and Middle America. In his lifetime, he was unmatched in the number of North American bird species that he described for science. As technical illustrator, Ridgway used his own paintings and outline drawings to complement his writing. He also published two books that systematized color names for describing birds, A Nomenclature of Colors for Naturalists (1886) and Color Standards and Color Nomenclature (1912). Ornithologists all over the world continue to cite Ridgway's color studies and books.
Navy blue is a dark shade of the color blue.
Beige is variously described as a pale sandy fawn color, a grayish tan, a light-grayish yellowish brown, or a pale to grayish yellow. It takes its name from French, where the word originally meant natural wool that has been neither bleached nor dyed, hence also the color of natural wool. It has come to be used to describe a variety of light tints chosen for their neutral or pale warm appearance.
Mahogany is a reddish-brown color. It is approximately the color of the wood mahogany. However, the wood itself, like most woods, is not uniformly the same color and is not recognized as a color by most.
Payne's grey is a dark blue-grey colour used in painting. It can be used as a mixer in place of black. Since it is less intense than black, it is easier to get the right shade when using it as a mixer. Originally a mixture of iron blue, yellow ochre and crimson lake, Payne's grey now is often a mixture of blue and black or of ultramarine and burnt sienna.
Taupe is a dark gray-brown color. The word derives from the French noun taupe meaning "mole". The name originally referred only to the average color of the French mole, but beginning in the 1940s, its usage expanded to encompass a wider range of shades.
Ecru is still defined by some dictionaries as the colour of unbleached linen, which it still is in French, but it is now used for a quite different, much darker color in English.
Fallow is a pale brown color that is the color of withered foliage or sandy soil in fallow fields.
In optics, orange has a wavelength between approximately 585 and 620 nm and a hue of 30° in HSV color space. In the RGB color space it is a secondary color numerically halfway between gamma-compressed red and yellow, as can be seen in the RGB color wheel. The complementary color of orange is azure. Orange pigments are largely in the ochre or cadmium families, and absorb mostly blue light.
Varieties of the color green may differ in hue, chroma or lightness, or in two or three of these qualities. Variations in value are also called tints and shades, a tint being a green or other hue mixed with white, a shade being mixed with black. A large selection of these various colors is shown below.
Tuscan red is a shade of red that was used on some railroad cars, particularly passenger cars.
Desert sand is a very light and very weakly saturated reddish yellow colour which corresponds specifically to the coloration of sand. It may also be regarded as a deep tone of beige.
Livid is a medium bluish-gray color. This color name comes from the Latin color term lividus meaning "'a dull leaden-blue color', and also used to describe the color of contused flesh, leading to the English expression 'black and blue'". The first recorded use of livid as a color name in English was in 1622.
Varieties of the color yellow may differ in hue, chroma or lightness, or in two or three of these qualities. Variations in value are also called tints and shades, a tint being a yellow or other hue mixed with white, a shade being mixed with black. A large selection of these various colors is shown below.
Tawny is a light brown to brownish-orange color.
Variations of gray or grey include achromatic grayscale shades, which lie exactly between white and black, and nearby colors with low colorfulness. A selection of a number of these various colors is shown below.
There are numerous variations of the color purple, a sampling of which are shown below.
Shades of brown can be produced by combining red, yellow, and black pigments, or by a combination of orange and black—illustrated in the color box. The RGB color model, that generates all colors on computer and television screens, makes brown by combining red and green light at different intensities. Brown color names are often imprecise, and some shades, such as beige, can refer to lighter rather than darker shades of yellow and red. Such colors are less saturated than colors perceived to be orange. Browns are usually described as light or dark, reddish, yellowish, or gray-brown. There are no standardized names for shades of brown; the same shade may have different names on different color lists, and sometimes one name can refer to several very different colors. The X11 color list of web colors has seventeen different shades of brown, but the complete list of browns is much longer.
Drab is a dull, light-brown color. It originally took its name from a fabric of the same color made of undyed, homespun wool. The word was first used in English in 1686. It probably originated from the Old French word drap, which meant cloth.
Shades of chartreuse are listed below. Historically, many of these colors have gone under the name of either yellow or green, as the specifics of their color composition was not known until later.
Color coordinates