Orange Alert: What Caused the Colors on This Snowy Owl?

Bill Diller, a photographer living in Huron County, Mich., had never seen a snowy owl quite like this.
In January, Mr. Diller's neighbor told him about a 'red-spotted snowy owl' in the area. It's a part of Michigan known as 'the Thumb,' which becomes home to many snowy owls in the winter.
People were calling the bird 'Rusty.'
'I had never heard of such a thing,' Mr. Diller said, 'so I figured either he didn't know what he was talking about or this was some kind of exotic bird from Asia.'
When he soon shared pictures on Facebook of the eye-catchingly orange bird perched atop a utility pole, he helped create a feathered phenomenon. The discovery has perplexed avian experts, too, creating an enduring mystery about what might have made a white bird turn bright orange.
Julie Maggert, a snowy owl enthusiast, heard of Mr. Diller's sighting and became determined to see 'Creamsicle,' as she affectionately nicknamed the bird.
She made a series of visits over several days from her home in Central Michigan with her Nikon Z8 and a zoom lens. After hours of waiting at a respectful distance, she finally got the perfect shot of the tinted bird on a telephone pole.
'My adrenaline was going crazy, I was so excited!' Mrs. Maggert said.
Her pictures helped make the case undeniable: The bird shared a color scheme with the planet Jupiter or a clownfish. But why?
Scientists who have studied owls for years struggled to explain the bird's curious plumage.
'In over 35 years of study, we have found over 300 nests and banded over 800 chicks,' Denver Holt, director of the Owl Research Institute in Charlo, Mont., said in an email. 'We have never seen any plumage aberration, or anything like what is in the photos of the owl.'
Kevin McGraw, a bird coloration expert and biologist at Michigan State University, shared a surprising hypothesis: The owl became orange as a result of a genetic mutation driven by environmental stress, such as exposure to pollution.
Dr. McGraw said in an email interview that samples from the bird were needed to test that and other hypotheses.
'We'd need to get feathers from this bird to understand the nature of the unique coloring,' he said.
Geoffrey Hill, an ornithologist at Auburn University and a co-author with Dr. McGraw of a book about bird coloration, shared his interpretation.
'It seems unlikely that it has spontaneously produced red pigmentation via a genetic mutation,' Dr. Hill said.
He said 'the red coloration seems too red to be caused by' natural pigmentation. He added that 'the pigmentation is not very symmetrical and appears on the parts of a normal snowy owl that are white.' He surmised that if the bird had a mutation, it would have changed the owl's black patterns, or eumelanin, to orange, or pheomelanin. That is not how the bird was currently colored.
He believed it looked more consistent with the external application of a dye.
Scott Weidensaul, a co-founder of Project SNOWstorm, a volunteer snowy owl research group, also dismissed the mutation hypothesis. Additionally, his organization ruled out that the bird had been marked with dye from the United States Geological Survey's Bird Banding Laboratory, which studies avian movements. It had been standard practice in the 1960s, before the advent of GPS transmitters, for snowy owl researchers to use spray paint to study migratory patterns.
Dr. Weidensaul offered his own suspicions about the bird's hue.
'The most likely explanation is that it was de-icing fluid at an airport, since some formulations are that red-orange color,' he wrote in an email.
The closest airport to where the bird had been spotted, Huron County Memorial Airport, did not reply to a request for comment.
Mrs. Maggert, who saw Rusty or Creamsicle with her own eyes, is skeptical that the owl became orange through accidental contact with a dye or spray paint.
'The way that it's on its body, I don't know how it could just accidentally rub up against paint all up on the front of her face and head and back,' she said.
Unless someone comes forward and admits to pigmenting the snowy owl, there will be no effort to study the bird up close, and its rusty appearance is likely to remain a mystery.
Karen Cleveland, a wildlife biologist at the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, said that the state had been aware of the bird since mid-January. While the owl appears 'healthy and well,' the state agency hasn't publicized its presence to limit snowy owl chasers from potentially stressing the bird.
'The department has no plans to try to capture it for any reason,' Ms. Cleveland said, 'so we're unlikely to ever have a conclusive explanation for this coloring.'

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Learn with AIFact CheckingText to SpeechAI Summary

Related Articles

Washington Post

21 hours ago

• Washington Post

It turns out weather on other planets is a lot like on Earth

What do the clouds on Jupiter, dust storms on Mars and rainstorms on Titan all have in common? They look like they belong on Earth. As we venture through the universe, scientists are finding uncanny — and sometimes unexpected — hints of Earth on other planets and moons. Clouds on Jupiter swirl like ocean eddies on Earth, and dust storms that act like hurricanes can inundate Mars. Even though these celestial bodies can be hundreds of million miles away from us, the same laws of physics apply, and what happens there can help us learn more about worlds that humans have yet to visit.

Yahoo

2 days ago

• Yahoo

Plants emit insect-repelling chemical that could secretly be poisoning our air

In the 2008 film 'The Happening', plants turned against humans in an eerie twist of nature, releasing invisible neurotoxins that drove people to their deaths. It was pure sci-fi horror, but the idea that plants can chemically shape the world around them isn't fiction. In fact, the air we breathe carries traces of a quieter kind of warfare — not against people, but pests. Scientists at Michigan State University have cracked a 40-year mystery around isoprene, a natural chemical that some plants emit to repel hungry insects. But there's a twist: while it defends the plant, it could be polluting the air. Isoprene is a colorless, volatile hydrocarbon, a simple organic compound made up of five carbon atoms and eight hydrogen atoms (C₅H₈). It's naturally released by certain plants, especially in hot weather, and is one of the most abundant hydrocarbons emitted into the atmosphere, second only to methane. Unlike the fragrant terpenes you'd smell in pine forests or poplar groves, isoprene is odorless yet highly reactive. Once released, it interacts with sunlight and nitrogen oxides from vehicle exhaust and industrial emissions, contributing to the formation of ozone, aerosols, and other pollutants that degrade air quality. 'Everyone understands what it smells like when you walk through a pine forest,' Sharkey said. 'In an oak grove, which has more hydrocarbons because it makes so much isoprene, you just don't notice it.' Until now, scientists weren't entirely sure why some plants go to the trouble of producing isoprene at all, especially since it doesn't seem to help them grow. But the new research suggests the answer lies in defense, not just against heat stress, but against hungry insects. In controlled greenhouse experiments, MSU researchers grew two types of tobacco plants — one genetically modified to emit isoprene, the other left unchanged. When whiteflies invaded, they swarmed the non-emitting plants while avoiding the isoprene producers altogether. Further tests using hornworms confirmed the pattern. Worms that fed on isoprene-rich leaves grew smaller and weaker than those that didn't. But it wasn't the isoprene itself that harmed them. Instead, the chemical triggered a spike in jasmonic acid, a defense hormone that disrupts an insect's ability to digest protein. 'The defense was not the isoprene itself, but the consequence of what isoprene did to the plant,' Sharkey said. Another surprise came from soybeans. Long believed to have lost the ability to make isoprene through evolution, soybeans were found to release it in small bursts when their leaves were damaged. The discovery suggests they still carry the gene to produce isoprene and switch it only under stress. Researchers say this discovery could change the way we protect crops. But that upside comes with a downside. Isoprene is a hydrocarbon that can worsen air pollution, especially in areas where air quality is already poor. If more crops are genetically modified to emit isoprene, it could further harm the atmosphere. The findings also raise concerns about how soybeans might be contributing to air pollution. 'That's one of the questions that's most important to come out of this research,' Sharkey said. 'Should we add isoprene to crop plants so that they're protected against insects and put up with their effect on the ozone? Or should we genetically engineer plants to turn off the isoprene synthase as much as we can to improve the atmosphere?' The findings come from two new studies published in Science Advances and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

Yahoo

3 days ago

• Yahoo

Rare exoplanet discovered in outskirts of the Milky Way

Astronomers have located a rare exoplanet on the edge of the Milky Way. The exoplanet, a gas giant named AT2021uey b, orbits a low-mass star and is located about 3,200 light-years away from Earth, according to a paper published last month in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. Its orbit around an M dwarf star -- a relatively small and cool star -- completes every 4,170 days. MORE: Exoplanet discovered in 2020 has the coldest temperatures ever measured, scientists say The researchers used a technique known as gravitational microlensing -- a method based on Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity -- to locate the planet. The presence of mass warps the fabric of space-time, similar to how a bowling ball would make a dent when placed on a trampoline, according to NASA. The effect is extreme around "very massive" objects, such as black holes and galaxies, but stars and planets can also cause a detectable degree of warping. The new exoplanet's mass is estimated to be slightly greater than Jupiter's, the researchers said. The unusual size ratio to the star it orbits led to its discovery, as detecting an Earth-type planet would have been "much more difficult," according to a press release by Vilnius University in Lithuania. Gravitational microlensing is a "rare phenomenon," the researchers said. There have only been three such cases of a planet being documented by microlensing in the history of observations, the researchers said. Astronomers search for a temporary light "pulsation" when analyzing a vast amount of data. The vast majority of observed stars -- about 90% -- pulsate for "various other reasons," with a minority of cases actually showing the microlensing effect, Marius Maskoliūna, an astronomy and astrophysics researcher at Vilnius University and co-author of the study, said in a statement. "This kind of work requires a lot of expertise, patience, and, frankly, a bit of luck," Maskoliūna said. "You have to wait for a long time for the source star and the lensing object to align and then check an enormous amount of data." MORE: Could our solar system have 9 planets after all? Astronomers may have confirmed possible existence. In addition, most microlensing efforts are recorded at the Galactic Center -- the densest part of the Milky Way, Edita Stonkutė, an associate professor of astronomy at Vilnius University, said in a statement. AT2021uey b was found quote far from the center, in the "galactic halo, on the outskirts of the galaxy, she said. "This is only the third planet in observational history to be discovered so far from the Galactic bulge," Stonkutė said. The microlensing technique is promising because it allows the detection of the "unexpected or even invisible," the researchers said. "What fascinates me about this method is that it can detect those invisible bodies," Maskoliūna said. In collaboration with researchers from the Astronomical Observatory of the University of Warsaw, the researchers analyzed data from the European Space Agency's "Gaia" telescope and supplemented it with ground-based observations from telescopes at the Vilnius University's Molėtai Astronomical Observatory. MORE: How astronomers used gravitational lensing to discover 44 new stars in distant galaxy The microlensing phenomenon was first spotted in 2021, which led the astronomers on a yearslong journey to "carefully" verify the existence of the new exoplanet, according to the release. The first discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a star was made in 1995, the researchers said. Since then, more than 6,000 exoplanets have been confirmed. However, the science is still considered "relatively young," the researchers said. "As data accumulated, we learned that many types of planetary systems are completely unlike ours -- the Solar System," Stonkutė said. "We've had to rethink planetary formation models more than once."