“You really need to come with me,” the voice was saying. “There are two albino blue birds just west of town.”
Not knowing what we’d encounter, we parked our car about a football field from a grove of trees that bordered each side of a country road and with camera in hand, and wishing we had our long lens with us, we walked slowly through the high-noon sunlight.
“There they are,” he said, pointing to two tiny dots on a barbed wire fence some distance away.
The pictures taken were not of sufficient quality to be of any use other than to be able to say, we were there, they were there and they were together. “The odds of finding two of them together are astronomical” I was assured.
So with that in mind the following morning, well before an angry sun burned its way through the cloud formations to our east, we parked our car in the same location and we walked as quietly as possible between the pastures that are the playground for wild life in the area.
It was as if we were the audience and they the entertainment. The show ranged from quietly beautiful to stunning.
The orchestra leader was a large woodpecker who couldn’t make up his mind between a nearby tree or the top of a utility pole… as to which might create the best opportunity for breakfast. If the woodpecker was indecisive, the much smaller blue birds were not.
They flew from the fences, fence posts and overhead utility lines, darted into the grasses and then reappeared moments later with their morning meal seconds from being devoured.
The normally colored blue birds and the “others” shared fence and utility lines, often looking at each other as though they were trying to figure who they were.
As the deep orange sun rose higher in the sky and the warmth of an East Texas summer again began to engulf the area, the lines emptied and the fence posts were left to await for another morning as the birds disappeared into the shade and protection of the nearby trees.
We don’t pretend to be experts in the ways of albino and leucistic birds, so we’ll defer to the more knowledgeable among our visitors.
It appears as though the birds are leucistic and yes, they are limited in number and we were simply excited to have been able to photograph the adventure even though the photographs were not the quality we prefer.
Early morning light limited what we were able to accomplish before they disappeared and we ran out of time.
This is an opportunity for our visitors to be involved. If you have some pertinent information about the birds in the pictures that you feel needs sharing, drop us a note via email.