I see no white eyes in the photo only pied markings.
@AugeredIn , that was my first reaction also, when I examined @KsKingBee 's photo last evening. But the more I thought about it, the more questions I had about that explanation.
I've already written about the little splashes in the middle of the white eyes... I had heard the same things as Zaz. But the white hurl above the colored eyes really was a stumper, though I looked around in internet la-la land, and found other photos labeled as WE with splashes like that... but no idea of whether the person doing the talking was correct. As we all know, the internet is rife with misinformation
But I was really stumped at the part where he said he didn't see any white on the feathers this year, AND at the part where there were just a few white markings on the bird's feathers last year.
All the pied pix that I can recall offhand seem to have blockier patterns in the white parts of the train, and the entire train feather usually seems to be white, rather than individual feathers splotched with white or half white. Specifically, white crest feathers have matched white spots on the bird's head/neck, as if the white crest feather were growing out of a white spot on the bird.
So the patterning that I have noticed on other pied birds is a different shape and size, and it affects the feathers differently, turning the whole feather white, not just splotching it a little.
And those areas of white stay FIXED for the bird's lifetime, I think... you can see where they are going to be when the bird hatches, if the chick pix are any indication.
But if kkb's bird has white that is just little blotches, and even more important, they MOVE AROUND from year to year, and molt to molt, then that "pied" or white-causing gene is operating very, very differently from the pied gene as I have previously visualized it... the one that causes the chicks to be born with pied patches that are always pied.
My opal silver pied still has spots of color in the very same places that the faint spots were located when he hatched.... those spots have remained stable through his lifetime. I've seen photos of pied chicks with big yellow patches and clear lines of demarcation from IB chick patterning on the chick -- kinda crisp lines between the yellow and the brown stripey chick feathers.
A pied splotch that moves around must be operating at the time of feather formation to somehow impede the deposition of pigment... that must be a different mode of operation from the feathers which are programmed to be solely white for a lifetime in one spot on the skin.
Again, analogizing to horses, some kinds of horse white relate to pigment of the underlying skin, while others have a different skin color underneath. The ones over white skin stay white, the others may act as dilution genes and may change the hair color later... You can see black skin and pink skin in patches on horses, and those stay the same. I'm oversimplifying here. Here's two websites, there are many others:
http://www.mustangs4us.com/Horse Colors/splashed_white.htm
http://www.etalondx.com/#!horse-genes-color/c91c
This is a long way of asking whether this bird of KKB's looks like a "different" version of pied? Maybe some of the reason that we see such variability in pied birds is because there really are more kinds of pied genes than we have identified so far? Lacking a way to distinguish them, we are just lumping them all together? Maybe what kkb has is a spotty kind of pied, instead of a big rounded blotch kind of pied? And maybe that spotty kind of pied changes location from year to year instead of remaining in the same exact spot on the bird forever? At least in the train feathers?
Okay, a really stupid question. I have never (thankfully!) seen a pea's skin with no feathers. Are there any noticeable markings other than the facial markings that we see with, for example, green birds? Does it depend on color of the bird? I told you it was a stupid question
