I am on my second model of a bird, my first bird was completed without any of the issues I am having now. I am trying to assign the Body UV colour to the main body hair, but it comes out black. When I remove the Normal map, it seems to work, but I want to apply the Normal map also. I thought I was getting the hang of blender, but I’m afraid I am a real Noob. The blend file is too large to upload so I have included as many settings as I could think of. Any help would really be appreciated.
Looks like you have two hair systems going - one for Gold Strands (which I assume is the one actually showing up with a golden color in the render), and Main Body hair, which I assume is the one showing up black.
Can you compare the two systems and find any differences between the two? Or any differences between their materials?
Hello, Yes thats correct about the two systems, yes, I have done that and also applied the gold material to the main body hair which then displays correctly the gold is just a colour and the main body hair material is the UVmap. The problem seems to be when the normal map is applied - thats when the main body hair goes black for some reason
It looks like your Normal Map strength is also set pretty high. Try changing it to 1, and see if that helps, and then turn it all the way down to 0.2 or something, and see if that makes it better.
I just tried that, still no difference in the hair colour. I put the normal map up so high as it wasn’t showing on the render otherwise, not sure if that is related.
What I did do which seems to fix it, was move the output from the normal map from the Normal Diffuse BSDF to the Displacement on the Material output. I have no idea why that works or if it will cause other problems?
That shouldn’t screw anything up, but it might not give quite the same normal map / bumping you’re looking for. If it does, though, that might be a good workaround.
Otherwise, I’m afraid I might be stumped.
Thanks for trying to help. one day if Im lucky I might actually get to understand Blender! 
No worries. I’ve got quite a ways to go myself!