Albino Canada Goose.

A pair of Canada Geese; one albino and one not.

It is not every day that you see something like this.  Out on a hike in the spring, a favourite time to be photographing wildlife, I came across an unusual sight.  A pair of Canada geese, but something was very different.  One was mostly all white.  My first reaction was to think it was some species of bird I was unfamiliar with.  Perhaps it was a domestic goose, the same way you find white ducks sometimes on a farm.  As I pondered on what it was, the only real solution was to take a few photos of it and check it out later.

This is something I do frequently when coming across some creature I do not know.  A photo gives me clear information on an organism's size, colours, and important field marks.  I usually take several images which help me to see more aspects of important features.  Once I have gotten home I go through the images and select ones that help with the process of identification.  First, I go through my field guides.  I have a lot of them, mostly of birds, but also of insects, reptiles, amphibians, mammals and even rocks.  If that doesn't do the trick I go online.

This was a special case though, and as I eliminated the plausible the unlikely started to become more probable.  Could this be an albino?  You see albino mice and rats in pet stores; their red eyes glowing back at you.  There are albino snakes and even albino humans.  This creature did not have red eyes, but albinos in nature tend not to.  I typed in "albino Canada goose" in Google and hit the images button.  There before me was a number of pictures of this unusual creature.

Melanin is the pigment in the skin which gives it colour.  Albinism is a condition where the gene responsible for making the protein is defective.  It is a recessive disorder, meaning that an individual has to have both genes, one from mom and one from dad, coding for that trait.  An organism can have one gene for albinism and one unaffected gene; they would appear normal but be a carrier.  If two such creatures mated and produced offspring, there is a 1 in 4 chance that each of them would be an albino.

In all of the thousands of Canada geese I have seen, only one of them was an albino.  A wonderful example of diversity in nature.  I wonder how many other fascinating traits there are which tend to go unnoticed?