Red-Eyed Magpies, White-Speckled Ravens & Other Birds of Unusual Feathers

“This here is my favorite cabinet,” Hein van Grouw tells me as we walk around the back rooms of the Natural History Museum at Tring, 30 miles northwest of London as the crow flies. He pulls the steel double-doors open, revealing a menagerie of stuffed birds. On the top shelves there are snipes, rails, and pigeons. Below them are thrushes and blackbirds. And filling the bottom, sliding shelves with smaller passerine birds: finches, starlings, and warblers.

Mostly collected by Walter Rothschild in the 19th century, all these birds share one thing in common: They have each inherited a genetic mutation—or mutations—that give them abnormal plumage. Their strange colorings make it difficult for me to identify even the most familiar of garden birds. One that is an odd mosaic of dark brown and milk-chocolate colors is apparently a melanistic chaffinch. Other birds seem faded as if time has sapped their vibrancy. A few are snow white.