I found it while on my morning constitutional. It looks to me like a primary feather from the right wing. I'm a novice at this sort of thing, so I could very well be wrong about that, but 1) the feather is more pointy at the tip (secondaries and tail feathers are rounder or more squared, right?), and 2) the leading edge is very narrow, as compared to the trailing edge.
So great. I think I can identify what kind of feather it is and from which part of the bird's body it came, but now what? It's about 11.5 cm long, and the red-orange color is more pronounced on the underside of the feather than the top side. Methinks more sleuthing is in order...
Interesting note: There's a sidebar in the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Handbook of Bird Biology (known as the Big Book of Bird Biology around my house) featuring a woman named Roxie Laybourne who worked for the Smithsonian (and the FBI) for many years who could identify a bird's species, sex and relative age by a feather (or sometimes a feather fragment)! Here's a tidbit from the Smithsonian about some of her work.
