We’ve seen a white moose, a blonde grizzly (RIP Nakoda), a white bison, and an albino fur seal, but until today, we’ve never seen a blonde badger. In fact, one wildlife professional calls this footage from a trail camera “a one in 10,000 thing.”
The Essex Wildlife Trust posted the footage on Instagram with no specific location information, presumably to protect the rare creature. The conservation charity says the blonde badger is an “unusual sight” and that its light fur is due to a rare genetic mutation.
The trust’s protected species manager, Darren Tansley, told BBC Essex: “It’s not something that’s unheard of. We do get a lot of different-color animals in our countryside . . . but there are very few badgers that have this colorization.”
Tansley says the badger isn’t albino; it simply has less pigment in the skin than usual.
Watch a blonde badger caught on camera without its stripes here:
Technically, this blonde badger does have stripes, according to Tansley. However, instead of the typical black stripes around its face, this peculiar badger has very light brown stripes that are hard to discern on the night-vision footage.
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Have you ever seen an animal in the wild with unusual coloration?