Outdoors Albino Magpie Found in Tasmania Ben Pobjie, SHARE

We don’t need any more reasons to think of Tasmania as weird. It’s cold, it’s remote, its history is unusually full of cannibals, and it’s got that scary museum. But whether we need them or not, they keep coming: this time it’s an albino magpie, found in the Trowunna Wildlife Park.

Magpies, of course, are well known for attacking the heads of unwary passersby should the latter go too near their eggs; and no doubt you’ll all find the idea of being divebombed by a vicious animal even more appealing when that animal has bright pink eyes. But this little guy is actually kind of cute, in a “Dear God will it eat my SOUL?” kind of way. At the very least he’s something you don’t see every day.

The good folk at Trowunna have taken the snowy little fella in, so as to protect him from the hazards of the wild: although albinism isn’t all that unusual in the animal world in general, to find an albino magpie is a real rarity, given how vulnerable the condition makes the bird. There’s a reason magpies tend to come in black and white, and removing the “black” from the equation will make one stand out like…well, like an albino magpie. Easy pickings for bigger birds, this magpie can thank his lucky stars that he was rescued when he was.

And Tasmania, it seems, just got a new, and suitably bizarre, mascot.