Looking at magpie photos (current iFocus) I came across this amazing shot of a leucistic magpie
I would like to encourage people who have pictures/records of leucistic birds or other taxa (not necessarily as spectacular as this example) to tag them as ‘leucistic’ as it would be good to be able to gather them all together. (There are, of course, many other colour variants, such as melanism and Xanthochromism but I think that it would be better to tag these differently. For example, there are many records of abnormal great tits in Surrey, some of which lack yellow pigmentation and others where the white cheek patches are black!)
We had a blackbird with a white head and neck not long ago.
When I was young we lived in a part of south buckinghamshire where there was quite a few blackbirds with white patches mostly on there wings.
They were only seen over a small area so just one or two breeding pairs.
I read « Leucistic animals may change their coloration throughout their lives as they usually don’t lose the genes for pigmentation; rather, they may be temporarily turned off. We’ve had leucistic animals turn from a majority white to nearly normal coloration over their lifespan. «
The article is about alligators.
The article also says « Leucism — which manifests in wildlife as white skin and dark eyes — is a rare color disorder occurring in a range of invertebrates and vertebrates, «
It seems very rare in inverts (if the google scholar search is to be believed) I found just one scorpion , Tityus pusillus .
Interesting! But surely leucism is at least to some extent due to an inherited gene. There are examples of ‘white feathered blackbirds’ occurring in a small area over several generations.
I think that melanism is a different colour aberration but for all I know it works in much the same way - as in Surrey’s well documented melanistic great tits.
I like the Wiki about white elephants and how it related to expensive useless things.
If your elephant gives birth to a calf with leucism in some parts of the far east you are lumbered with it.
and there may be others. I’m leaving a message for a contributor who was last active in 2021 re a leucistic blackbird they observed in 2020, asking for tagging if they get the message.
To keep the tagging to the minimum necessary, Mike has added ‘leucistic’ rather than both tags that have been in use. So if you see an observation with a leucistic animal, please ask the observer to add the descriptive tag ‘leucistic’ choosing from the existing drop-down tag list so that a collection can be continued as Ken (Surreybirder) has promoted at the top of this thread. @Surreybirder@dejayM@NorthernTeacher
