With the end of the wildfowling season it is amazing how quickly the geese seem to have lost there fear of Man. As this morning I sat in plain site only a 100m away from the flock and watched them for some time and managed to get this grainy picture of this leucistic barnacle in amongst the 1500 others.
The terms leucistic and leucism are derived from a medical terminology basically leuc- is a Latin variant of leuk- from the Greek leukos meaning "white" .
This is a condition in which there is full or partial loss of pigmentation in an animal resulting in white, pale, or patchy coloration of the skin, hair, feathers, scales or cuticle, but not the eyes. Unlike albinism, it is caused by a reduction in multiple types of pigment, not just melanin.