Subject: [Tweeters] Brewer's Black-and-white-bird
Date: Jan 31 20:23:40 2011
From: heapbigdoc at netscape.net - heapbigdoc at netscape.net



I've got a question for the bird biologists out there.

Yesterday, 1/30/11, I found a large mixed blackbird flock at the intersection of Road 170 and Baart (sic) Lane in Franklin County, between Mesa and Basin City. The flock was mostly Red-winged and Brewer's Blackbirds with a lot of Yellow-heads and a few Brown-headed cowbirds. I spent about twenty minutes trying to pick out a Rusty Blackbird before the flock drifted away from the road.

No luck with the Rusty, but I did find what I would call a piebald Brewer's. The base plumage was shiny black like a normal Brewer's, but with an apparently random scattering of pure white feathers. The impression was a black bird that had been splattered with white paint. Both black and white were sharp - no gray or brown. All individual feathers appeared to be either all black or all white - not a mix.

So here are the biology questions: is this bird best described as leucistic? Is this a pigmentation disorder? Is it a chimera (like a calico cat)? Is it possible to answer the question without a picture? (Of course I didn't have a camera along.) Or is my embryology and biology background so out of date that the questions don't even make sense?

Any answers, opinions, or speculations would be appreciated.

-Roy A. Myers, Benton City, WA