I was DELIGHTED to see this potential correction in my notes, as it is an invitation to talk about a FAVORITE THING. I didn’t challenge the OP’s description myself as, to me, this is actually textbook leucism. Albinism is the complete loss of melanin, so you’re either albino or you’re not, but leucism is considered to be a spectrum; in terms of melanin loss, it can be any decrease in melanin between albino and wild-type. So the instant that I saw this proposed correction, I took off my hat and threw it on the floor and shouted “I am READY to aRGUE that this bird is leucistic - just with higher degree of color loss than we may have expected to see. YEEHAW.” I was extremely excited and happy about the opportunity.
The reason I felt so confident is the blue shade of the eyes and the beige-y beak. Blue eyes are perfectly on-brand for leucistic animals, as blue eyes in animals (and humans) are caused by partial deposits of melanin; albinism is usually characterized by pink- or red-appearing eyes, because there is no cloud of melanin between the surface of the eye and the blood vessels behind it. If there is enough melanin to make a blue eye, then you can make the argument that the animal is leucistic.
I would also expect to see pink legs and beak rather than pale ones, like the OP bird has. Albinos also have a watery-pink sort of look around the eyes, which are generally not sparkling/bright, and I feel like there is a sort of raggedness about the feathers of an albino bird, probably due to the difficulty they have with poor vision.
Above is an albino magpie from an article in the Nautilus, with that sort of pinkish transparency and watery, ragged look I associate with a bird that has poor vision. With this visual comparison, I honestly would look at the bird in the OP and still call it leucistic, even though @birdsbugsandbones produces a good and compelling argument. (ETA, if it isn’t clear! I think they made a very VERY good argument and I definitely re-examined everything carefully and joyfully because of it! I am really happy to be talking about this! They make some great points!)
The literature is, of course, so confusing that Cornell has released a statement stating that the literature is confusing. Thanks, Cornell!
But let us never forget that Birdwatching People Are Mad with a Fulgent and Glittering Madness. So after throwing down my hat on a point of pedantry, I then proceeded to cheat by tapping into the rich seam of Birdwatching Madness that I expected lurked behind the photo in the OP. And boy, did it pay the FUCK off.
The source, the Macaulay Library, kindly tells us (after a lightyear of scrolling through entries for the Common Raven, Jesus Christ, Cornell, Pull Your Shit Together) that the two photos in the OP were taken by Cos van Wermeskerken on 6 Jul 2018, in Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada. Thanks, Cornell!
However, within thirty miles of the excellently-documented sighting in the OP are the Qualicum White Ravens, which are very exciting to birders. Apparently this area of British Columbia is just CRAWLING with ‘white ravens,’ which are happily documented in the media because birdwatchers will literally cross the planet to shove a camera up the ass of a weird bird. And apparently they have a good chance of doing so on Vancouver Island.
This raven family - led by two normal black parents - appears to have produced off-colored offspring in this specific area for Years. They’re based around Qualicum Beach, and I remind you that the bird in the OP was spotted in Nanaimo.
That’s under 30 miles apart AS THE CROW FLIES! (Finger guns.) I would predict with some certainty that the bird in the OP photos is a member of this famous family.
One birder provided some lovely photos of a 2008 family of ravens at Qualicum Beach, below:
They look pretty similar to the OP bird - creamy with blue eyes and beige beaks.
In 2016, a white raven called Jasper was described in Scientific American, where the author went into some detail justifying their description of Jasper as leucistic and not albino:
“Jasper” was photographed in Courtenay. The parents of the white raven offspring are strongly associated with Qualicum Beach. Again, the bird in the OP was photographed in 2018 in Nanaimo. The sightings are clearly in a very specific area.
But, most tellingly, another potential member of their family was described as “leucistic” by a forensic ornithologist in July 2018:
Despite what internet memes suggest, parent ravens do not eat their white offspring, said Kaeli Swift, a doctoral candidate at the University of Washington.
“They are often more subordinate, so they get picked on by other birds. But (the parents) don’t just take them out,” she said.
The Qualicum white ravens are not albinos — which have no pigment at all. Rather, they are the product of a genetic defect that dilutes their colour.
“You can also get all-white birds, but you can also get caramel-coloured birds, cappuccino colour, or crazy white stripes,” said Swift.
The Coombs bird likely has genetic anomalies that prevent the formation of two of the three types of melanin pigments, eumelanin and pheomelanin, according to Ildiko Szabo, a forensic ornithologist and curator at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum.
Most black birds have a mixture of those pigments — the Coombs bird probably has little of either.
“When that happens, it results in this extremely pale cafe au lait plumage,” Szabo said.
The “Coombs bird” they are referring to is a white raven that has been sighted around a farm near Qualicum Beach in July 2018:
And here is a picture of the 2018 Coombs bird by Mike Yip, who has been photographing the Qualicum white ravens for years:
Since these sightings of a pale-colored raven were in the same month, and about 20-something miles apart, in an area known for its white ravens, I would say that the Coombs bird is a relative of the OP bird, or perhaps even the same individual bird.
And it has been strongly and consistently argued that this specific bird, and the Qualicum white ravens generally, are leucistic and not albino.
So we must now decide if we can trust the word of Ildiko Szabo, forensic ornithologist and curator at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum, when she described the Coombs bird as probably having partial melanin deposits (and therefore not albino). Here is a video I found of her discussing the case of a single bird that flew from Asia to Canada (she is gesturing with the actual body of the bird here):
She looks like the type of person who could say ANYTHING about ANY bird, and I’d personally accept it. I would immediately give her my hat. She’s wearing a bird shirt and gesturing with a dead bird that she just stuffed, she’s a forensic ornithologist, she coauthored a 2018 paper in Nature on raven genetics. If she says a white raven spotted on Vancouver Island in July 2018 was probably leucistic, and she thinks it’s because it has less eumelanin and pheomelanin, then heck! Okay by me! If she wants to say it has “extremely pale cafe au lait plumage” rather than white, then sure! I’ll follow your lead on that, Ildiko!
Anyway, we could all be wrong, and whoever is right can GLADLY have The Hat. I’ve been raven on the topic long enough! But I’m happy to keep the OP raven in the Leucism Channel, where I will argue that it belongs.
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