There are no special treats for the birds in my garden. It's always seemed perverse to me to strafe your lawn and borders with pesticides and then put out specially-grown nuts for the birds when, left to its own devices, a garden - particularly one like mine! - should provide enough to sustain a reasonable community of feathery visitors. So my avian fauna aren't usually very diverse. But just over the last couple of days in addition to the great tits, blue tits and shouty robins I've seen goldfinches where they have never been before and, today, what seemed to be a blackcap in the distance.
And the leucistic blackbird has reappeared! Below is an old photo as I wasn't organised enough to snap it. Blackbirds don't live more than a few years so every time it's absent for a while I wonder whether it's still around. But not only did it reappear, it was scrapping with another leucistic blackbird: the one I'm familiar with has a white patch at its shoulder, whereas the newcomer sported white tail feathers and a patch along its side. Which raises the question of the levels of leucism in the bird population: are they increasing? What are the chances of two birds of the same species with the same mutation turning up in the same garden?
Is it genetic? Siblings? Offspring?
ReplyDeleteLeucism is indeede genetic, though I would have thought it was unlikely that the birds are siblings as I have only seen one over a couple of years; and wouldn't offspring go somewhere else? Admittedly perhaps it had, and then come back. Would parents recognise adult offspring or vice versa? I don't know enough about bird behaviour to judge!
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