Last Wednesday found me out and about on a visit to Waterton Canyon to see what the bighorns were up to. I was looking forward to getting lucky and capturing some rut behavior in the way of their famous bashing of heads. A lovely morning for a stroll, I ended up walking all the way up to Strontia Dam and back with nary a critter of any kind in sight. I had only two miles left out of the 12+ total walk.

I finally came upon 20-30 of the band settled in high above the road across the creek. They were just beginning to stir from their safe perches of the previous night. I decided to stop for a bit, and headed over to chat with another photographer. I had hoped that they might make their way down during our conversation and I might see a little action before I headed home for the day.

As we chatted, I caught a bit of movement through the air in the way of a distant white blur. As my eyes trained in on the far hillside it appeared to be a raptor that had dived into the brush. Moments later it emerged. My assumptions were proven correct; it was certainly a larger bird and had a freshly caught small rodent in its beak. It chose a dead snag high on an opposite hillside from which to take its snack. This allowed me to zero in my lens on it as it ate. Not long after, it once again took wing and headed out of sight over the high ridge, leaving me baffled over its identification.

Upon returning home I began to do a little research. Along with my own findings, I also began seeing posts on social media of others’ photos of the same bird, identified as a leucistic red tailed hawk. Hawks tend to be territorial, and the canyon gets a lot of human traffic, so the hawk had been spotted and photographed quite a bit over the last few days in its chosen hunting grounds.

Leucism is an interesting phenomenon in nature. It is a “step down” from albinism. Albinism is where an albino creatures body produces no melanin whatsoever (the main pigment that causes skin, hair, scale and feather coloration). Leucistic creatures produce very little melanin, leaving some splotches of color, as noted under the wings of the hawk seen here. Another name for the phenomenon is “Piebald,” also seen in horses and deer.

Aside from the trait differentiation of all white vs. splotchy coloration that separates albinism from leucism, eye coloration is also a great tell. A true albino creature tends to have red or pink eyes, as the lack of any colored pigment reveals the red of blood vessels better. As you can see with the hawk, it retained the darker eyes of leucism.

These traits tend to be quite rare (the rate of albinism is estimated somewhere between 1 in 20,000 to 1 in 1 million, but tends to be more common in birds, reptiles and amphibians). In the wild, the lack of ability to camouflage tends to make an animal easy prey. In the case of predators, they have less success as a hunter, and potential starvation due to being seen in their hunt more easily. Thus, many creatures do not live long enough to pass along the genetics. Pure albinos also tend to have limited eyesight, or are completely blind. This is also linked to the lack of pigment, making hunting or avoiding predation that much more challenging.

After a bleak 12 miles in terms of photography, the encounter left me feeling quite fulfilled when it was all said and done. The photo-perfectionist in me is slightly saddened at being far too distant for a decent, “print-worthy” image. On the other hand, the naturalist side of me is overwhelmed at the fact that I even witnessed the bird with my own eyes, let alone, walking away with semidecent, (if a touch blurry) images of such a rare phenomenon. It is never a bad day of wildlife photography when you get a “first” of any kind, much less one so very rarely seen in the wild!

For information about James DeWalt Photography, check out https:// jamesdewaltphotography.com.

[Additional information for this article came from https://www.treehugger.com/ whats-the-difference-between-albino-andleucistic 4864546#:~:text=Leucism%20 and%20albinism%20are%20often,a%20 partial%20loss%20of%20pigmentation.]