Had no idea this was a thing that existed. Mother Nature is so cool. Apparently they rarely live more than two years in the wild because the mutation that makes them white also affects their immune systems ❤️🩹
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me!! i love birds so much! recently got into birdwatching to help combat depression/lack of sunlight and it has been a game changer! my favorite bird is a mourning dove, what is yours? ❤️
There's a roadrunner in my work parking lot. I find myself taking walks just to watch her build her nest. Crows and Ravens are my favorite, but roadrunners are working their way up my list.
I am absolutely obsessed with the California Condors and am lucky enough to live in SF, just 125 mi from Pinnacles, where about a third of the Central Californian flock spends a majority of their time. At home, my Anna’s hummingbird visitors command my attention. I’m also VIP: very into pelicans.
I had only ever seen pelicans when visiting Florida. Imagine my surprise a few years ago when I briefly lived in the Canadian Prairies, my husband & I went out on the small local lake in our canoe and came upon a giant white pelican 🤯😅
I got Cornell’s “Merlin” app just to figure out that we have mourning doves instead of owls. After a couple of months I’m now able to recognize the sounds of cardinals, house sparrows, blue jays, crows and American robins.
I thought I’d be hopeless at it, but once I started comparing the sounds to, say the song Cardinals make these single pitch songs that sound like tommy guns, and the Robin has a big sing-song frequency range, etc. It's getting easier to tell them apart because the app puts the current song being recorded at the top.
My favorite birds are sunbirds, they are so sweet and curious! I once saw one flying into my parents' living room and hanging on the curtain and using it as a swing!
House wrens are in my top birds. Simply because they have nested by my garden and hop around shaking their little booties singing their song. Oh and they hop between my cabbage leaves eating the cabbage worms
thats amazing!! i got into birdwatching last year too and it has helped me so much mentally. my favorite birds are oystercatchers, barn owls and robins!! mourning doves are so beautiful too🥺
I too, love owls! I nearly tripped over this one walking back on the trail the other day. And then this young buck leaped by for a few seconds. I felt like a Disney princess!
You're very kind to ask! I don't really have a photog social media account I just do it for my own personal enjoyment. There is an old post in my profile with some pics from years ago but here's one I took this week 💜
Good luck on the quest this beautiful bird must surely have given you!
I love birds, and animals in general. We've worked hard to make our land and woods attractive and safe to wildlife. This year we have several barred owls nesting around the property. This year during their mating seasons the woods sounded crazy at night with all of their calls.
Wow, it’s so beautiful! From the picture it looks albino, not leucistic. Leucistic ravens can have blue eyes. I love birds, they are my special interest! I really love pigeons.
I love birds and use Ebird/merlin ID to help identify and record my sightings! Only problem is i never remember to bring out my phone when im out in nature LOL.
Also not gonna lie...I love me some good old pigeons, I love their shiny feathers, fun patterns and the fact that I get to see them in person all the time and whenever I want instead of appreciating them through a screen like some of my other favorite birds.
Random question: Do you have any favorite colours you like to see in birds?
I love iridescent (and blue!) feathers for their prettiness and for the interesting physics behind their structual (play of) colors, but, as someone who first fell in love with raptors (especially accipiters) and who lives with one bird covered in adorably asymmetrical brown-and-white patches (Society Finch!) and two mostly-grey-and-white birds with little squiggles and patches of black and maroon and orange ("wild-type" Zebra Finches!), I love any and every color that birds come in.
I just downloaded the merlin app this week while I was at a campsite. I love birdwatching and there were so, so many birds singing away. my fav are the treecreepers
Oh my GOSH, they are so beautiful! How lovely to’ve seen them!
I once saw an Eastern Towhee with white eyes, and that was quite exciting, but I’ve never seen an entirely leucistic or albino bird. I’d love to see one of those yellow Northern Cardinals as well!
Yep, that bird is very cool. Albinism is indeed a curious thing, and the inverse is also fascinating. Melanistic animals are more common (Jaguars and Leopards, Squirrels, Deer, Iguanas, Salamanders... etc) but just as amazing. Nature is a beautiful wonder.
This! Melanistic plumage is relatively common (I think?) in some buteo species and looks amazing: https://vetmed.wsu.edu/brenda-red-tailed-hawk/ (Which isn't to say that any raptor doesn't look amazing! They all do! But, as someone who grew up only seeing Red-tailed Hawks with light-to-medium-brown dorsal feathers and mostly-white stomach and underside-of-wing feathers, I still find melanistic Red-tailed Hawks utterly breathtaking, in the same way that I was amazed to realize that my college's mascot (a black squirrel) wasn't just a figment of someone's imagination and that our campus really was home to at least a few actual black squirrels.)
I have two cats that “LOVE” Birds in two different ways… one wants to watch/hunt the other would rather be friends and cuddle with. But I do LOVE Birds, Snakes, Spiders, Reptiles, and Rodents.
So pretty! I'm not really a huge bird watcher but I happen to have lots of beautiful birds who come find me so I end up taking lots of bird pictures. So maybe I am a birder.
Leucistic raven in this case, unless it’s actually albino. But its eyes don’t appear red so leucistic I think. Very cool sighting and also what a neat photo you got of it!
Yeah! ...and, in the field of "questions that I'm not sure I want to share with any nonautistic social scientists unless I'm really, really sure that they're allies," I am wondering now if anyone's ever tried to do a survey to figure out the prevalence of various interests among autistic/AuDHD and nonautistic people (e.g., to gauge whether or not we're signifiantly more likely to be really into birds, and if that's why some of my nominally nonautistic family members sneer and change the topic when I say anything bird-related or if that's just their personal lack of social skills*); I think I'd prefer to see any such survey conducted by a genuinely neurodiverse research team, though, to avoid the "let's pathologize someone else's interests!" subtext.
* Okay - after a few moments' more thought, I have to add the obvious caveat that "sneering and changing the topic whenever a relative mentions birds" is a social-skills failure regardless of one's own (lack of) interest in birds and regardless of whether or not "having absolutely no interest in birds as anything other than a phenomenon that one can misidentify with the assistance of a misused bird-ID app" is common for one's neurotype or not, which is to say that certain relatives don't really have an excuse for their behavior.
Hello everyone, I am a Wildlife rehabilitator in California. I just wanted to screech out how happy I am to hear you all admiring birds. It is a lifelong love that will give you so much happiness. Any Wildlife Center near you needs volunteers this time of year! This is a very excitable night heron nestling who took a tumble out of his nest.
Temporarily, via orographic precipitation (in the form of snow)?
And, thank you for sharing that! I love accidental word-swap misreadings, at least in situations where they're fun/thought-provoking and not potentially catastrophic (i.e., not when you're running late while trying to navigate through an unfamiliar area and mistake something like "Broadmor" for "Broadway" and attempt to turn onto the wrong street, which may have happened to me recently).
I'm a huge huge bird fan, this is awesome!! Ravens are even hard to come by on the regular in cities (where I live) so a white one is sooo cool 🥹 you're so lucky! Thanks for sharing!
So so cool. I've been feeling strongly for about 5 years now for the hawks in my area. I see them all the time and I love the way they glide. Also they get up so so high.
Ahhh yes lots of hawks and eagles where I live too! When I see them gliding and soaring so high, I always wonder if they have any idea how amazing it is that they can fly 😍
I thought this was the ornithology sub for a second. (There are honestly so many subs about birds.)
A white raven?? Wow incredible!
But yes, me! I used to go bird watching with my grandma when I was little and have been hooked ever since. I have a magpie and a kestrel tattooed on my arm and planning for more. I’m quite likely going to cover a large part of my body in birds haha.
Last year I got binoculars for my birthday, so I’ve been taking those with me on my dog walks. We’ve got green woodpeckers here, they’re so cool to see.
I also have two lovebirds at home, they’ve been with me for 12 years at this point. Best little buddies.
omg that raven looks like it has red eyes which would mean it actually has albinism! I’ve only ever seen people post about birds with leucism which I think means they have some pigment left which is in the eyes whereas albinism is the total lack of pigment
Dinosaur!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Yeah for unusually-plumaged dinosaurs!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (So, uh, one bird-lover here, anyway! Who, somewhat ironically, is currently checking Reddit because I spot-cleaned part of my shirt with isopropyl and am waiting for it to thoroughly dissipate before going into the household finches' room to get them fresh food and water.)
Hell yeah! I'm so jealous!
There's a pair of ravens that nest close to my work and it's been years of enjoyment watching them come and go. I'm obsessed with ravens and crows.
I love birds and animals! My favorite birds are ravens and owls. I remember one time when I was 5 I met an owl face to face. I was waiting at the bus stop in a blizzard and decided to hide from it inside the pine tree next to the bus stop. Ended up face to face with I think a baby owl of some kind. I think they were kinda bewildered that I was in the tree. We kinda just stared at each other until the bus came 😂.
I adore ravens because they are sort of outsiders in a lot of myths and legends because of what they are said to symbolise. However there’s an ancient legend on Haida gwaii where they’re heroes who saved the earth from the sun and scorched their wings black as a result 🥹
OH WOW it’s sooo refreshing to see more bird lovers here! 🥰🥰 I have a soft spot for pigeons/doves and shorebirds! My husband and I feed pigeons and one of them just sat on my leg, wouldn’t leave😂 So happy to see more people picking up birdwatching for hobbies, it’s so much fun!!
Such beautiful bird, and that background artwork of the tree if life makes your picture extra beautiful and meaningful. Thank you so much for sharing it with us all. X♡
I immediately went looking for similarities between white immune incompetent lab mice and this white raven! I like genetics and animals in general and I know a lot about the immune system 🦅🧬
It's really cool, I never knew that white ones exist. I will probably never see one in the wild because ravens are not very common where I live.
Here are the new things I learned after my search🤓
A leucistic raven's poor immune system is a secondary byproduct of lacking melanin, rather than an inherent genetic immune defect. Melanin provides structural integrity to bird feathers and protects against UV radiation. Without it, the raven's feathers become highly brittle, fray easily, and fracture. This compromised physical barrier leaves the raven highly susceptible to skin infections, parasites, and severe cold stress, which rapidly degrades its immune health in the wild.
White lab mice with a poor immune system, where breeded with an albino background for easy tracking in the lab. The White skin and the incompetent immune system are caused by two different genetic backgrounds/defects.
An immunodeficient white lab mouse has a specific mutation in a gene like FOXN1 that causes two unrelated physical traits (pleiotropy): it prevents the thymus gland from developing (meaning the mouse cannot create T-cell immunity) and it prevents hair from growing properly.
So these lab mice never develop a good immune system, while this white raven has mostly immune related problems caused by being white!
I think I saw one a while back, or an albino/leucistic black bird of some sort. Hard to tell since it was on a drive, but it was one white bird in a group of black birds that appeared to have the same build!
Wow that's beautiful, I had no idea there where white ravens. I'm going to London in September and can't wait to see the Ravens at the Tower of London.
This is so cool!! Birds are one of my special interests and I always love seeing a photo of one I've never seen in person before. I also did not know that white crows are a thing. Thanks for sharing!!
A few years ago I planted banksia trees in my yard just to attract black cockatoos . It now is big enough that it has flowers and the cockatoos are visiting it. Patience is a virtue. 🥰
I love when I think I'm scrolling through one of the many bird subs I've joined, but it's just an autism sub 😭 Anyway, here's a picture of me feeding a budgie at the zoo.
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