Ornithopus pinnatus(Mill.) Druce

yellow bird's-foot

WFO wfo-0000205808 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Ornithopus pinnatus, photographed by Joe Dillon
fig. a Joe Dillon, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-01-07 / obs. 175936090

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

The specimen a real sheet, in a real collection

Herbarium
The New York Botanical Garden
Accession
04816044
Filed as
Ornithopus pinnatus (Mill.) Druce
Det. by
not recorded on this sheet
Collected
not recorded
Origin
not recorded
The sheet
View the digitised specimen (CC BY 4.0)

A real pressed plant, in a real collection, under the accession number above. Not an illustration of one. The holding institution does not serve this sheet’s image to third parties, so there is no photograph here. The record is real and the link goes to it. Where we hold no openly licensed sheet for a species this section is simply absent, and where a sheet never recorded who determined it, that field stays empty rather than being filled in. Roughly half of all herbarium sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 20 botanical countries

Regions where Ornithopus pinnatus is native: Algeria, Azores, Canary Is., Madeira, Morocco, Tunisia, East Aegean Is., Lebanon-Syria, Palestine, Türkiye, Baleares, Corse, France, Great Britain, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Sardegna, Sicilia, Spain AlgeriaMoroccoTunisiaEast Aegean Is.Lebanon-SyriaPalestineTürkiyeCorseFranceGreeceItalyPortugalSiciliaSpain AzoresCanary Is.MadeiraBalearesSardegna
Native distribution of Ornithopus pinnatus, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows. Regions too small to draw at this scale are marked with a dot.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Baleares BAL EUROPE
Corse COR
France FRA
Great Britain GRB
Greece GRC
Italy ITA
Portugal POR
Sardegna SAR
Sicilia SIC
Spain SPA
Algeria ALG AFRICA
Azores AZO
Canary Is. CNY
Madeira MDR
Morocco MOR
Tunisia TUN
East Aegean Is. EAI ASIA-TEMPERATE
Lebanon-Syria LBS
Palestine PAL
Türkiye TUR

Not drawn on the map: Great Britain. We hold no public-domain boundary for this region, so it is listed rather than guessed at.

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Flowering 219 in flower of 236 examined

Proportion of examined Ornithopus pinnatus in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 7 7 100% 65% to 100%
Feb 2 2 too few examined
Mar 12 12 100% 76% to 100%
Apr 29 29 100% 88% to 100%
May 37 44 84% 71% to 92%
Jun 7 8 88% 53% to 98%
Jul 5 5 100% 57% to 100%
Aug 11 16 69% 44% to 86%
Sep 13 15 87% 62% to 96%
Oct 46 47 98% 89% to 100%
Nov 37 37 100% 91% to 100%
Dec 13 14 93% 69% to 99%

Peak flowering in Jan. Each bar is the share of Ornithopus pinnatus observations in which someone actually recorded the reproductive state and found the plant in flower, not the raw number of flowering records. That distinction matters: people observe plants far more in spring than in winter, so a bare count of flowering records partly measures when people go outside. Dividing by the number examined removes that. 219 of 236 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. One month has fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for it. This is still a global aggregate and not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres. Where a species has fewer than 30 flowering records we do not draw this chart at all. Computed from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Where it actually grows measured, from 587 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 3.6 °C 8.9 °C 13.7 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 19.8 °C 22.6 °C 31.2 °C
Annual rainfall 583 mm 1,169 mm 1,956 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 11 mm 144 mm 297 mm

It is found where winters are cool but frost is light or absent. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 587 research-grade observations of Ornithopus pinnatus that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one. Climate from CHELSA V2.1 (Karger et al. 2017); occurrences from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Also published as 18 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

  • Arthrolobium ebracteatum (Brot.) DC.
  • Arthrolobium pinnatum Rendle & Britten
  • Artrolobium ebracteatum (Brot.) Desv.
  • Artrolobium pinnatum (Mill.) Rendle & Britten
  • Coronilla ebracteata (Brot.) E.H.L.Krause
  • Ornithopodium bracteolatum Bubani
  • Ornithopodium ebracteatum (Brot.) Kuntze
  • Ornithopus durus DC.
  • Ornithopus ebracteatus Brot.
  • Ornithopus exstipulatus Thore
  • Ornithopus exstipulatus var. pygmaeus (Viv.) Rouy
  • Ornithopus laevigatus Sm.
  • Ornithopus littoralis Gand.
  • Ornithopus microphyllus Gand.
  • Ornithopus nudiflorus Lag.
  • Ornithopus pygmaeus Viv.
  • Scorpiurus pinnata Mill.
  • Scorpiurus pinnatus Mill.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
  3. Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
  4. Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.