Bar's Curious Discovery: Yellow Magpie in the Garden | Sweden

Barr Edwardson tells us yellow-and-black magpies have been living in his fence for about two months. When he saw the first magpie, he thought it had changed color somehow.

– But when I saw that there were many of them, I thought it was strange, so I started searching on Google and saw that a similar magpie was seen in Norway in 2014. Then I thought: This is a bit strange, says Parr.

However, it turned out that his initial idea was not completely wrong.

Expert theory

Diederik Vanhonecker, a duty biologist at the Natural History Museum, receives reports of yellow-and-black magpies about every two years. There is no precise explanation as to why the color mixture occurs, but it is most likely that the white parts of their feathers have been discolored by some type of yellow pigment.

– They likely bathed in water containing the dye or became infected in some other way, he says.

Other possible theories are that the yellow color is due to a genetic change, or that they ate something that had a yellow tinge to their feathers, just as flamingos get their pink color from eating pink crustaceans.

But both of these explanations are extremely unlikely. What's more likely is that she got pigment, and since it's evenly distributed over all the white parts, you can imagine she bathed in something and got the color that way, says Diederik Vanhonacker.