Where would we be without our livestreamers? They’re an extra 10 or 20 pairs of eyes for us and they see things we miss.
This morning they saw an astonishing white bird at the tree stump den water bowl. When they asked us what it was in a chat message, I thought “white? We don’t have any white birds here”. And how wrong I was. I looked at the video clips and it turns out we do. Just one.
Dan took a snapshot from the screen and asked Merlin what it thought. “Hmmmm”, said Merlin. “A budgie?”. We were unimpressed and turned to Google, which suggested a leucistic* bluebird. A bit more plausible. And then one of our livestreamers nailed it: “Looks like it could be a leucistic brown-headed cowbird” and we’re about 99.99% sure that’s correct.
So, you saw it here first, ladies and gentlemen. A leucistic (pigment-less) brown-headed cowbird.
It was certainly a first for us – and, to top off our morning, it turns out that this extraordinary white bird had followed hot on the “heels” of a male painted bunting; the most outrageously colorful bird we ever see followed by a 1/30,000 white rarity.
*Leucism in birds is caused by a genetic glitch that causes the bird’s feathers, beak/bill, and legs to develop without their normal pigment. If the bird’s irises are also without pigment, it would be considered albino, so a leucistic bird is almost albino but not quite.
Credit: The beautiful photo of a male brown-headed cowbird that we use at the beginning of the video is from the website of the Maine Audubon Society.