Big Blue

Don't adjust your monitor; that wolf's eyes are blue.

It's a common (and totally, completely, and erroneous) misconception that adult wolves cannot have blue eyes.
Blue eyes are unusual in gray wolves, though not terribly rare; you'll find them once in a blue moon, but several times before the next solar eclipse. In fact, I have seen at least two blue-eyed wolves in person and several more in photographs.

Some say the blue-eye gene sometimes emerges, but only in leucistic wolves. The wolf above clearly isn't leucistic (he's a faded agouti), and another blue-eyed wolf has even darker markings.

Others say the gene comes from dogs.
Now this is something I don't know, but I'll leave you with this: wolves do not naturally come in black. The black fur gene came from dogs, but it survived so many generations that many "pure" wolves today are black.
None of the blue-eyed wolves I know have dogs or wolfdogs in their known ancestry.

And yet others would say this must be shopped.
I'd tell them to get their heads out of their textbooks and take a look at the real thing from time to time.



Taken at the Wildlife Prairie State Park near Peoria, Illinois.
Possibly the best park ever, that one!

Edit: Additional information:
Other photos of these wolves: [link] [link] (with absolutely no editing/post-processing/trick photography)
They are eastern timber wolves, and yes, I really want to know why they have blue eyes. It's killing me.


Edit 2: a lead?
Some biologists now claim that the eastern timber wolf or eastern wolf may be a separate species, an older resident of North America than the gray wolf and more closely related to coyotes and red wolves.
Some coyotes (and red wolves) have been found with blue eyes. The last image on this page is especially interesting: [link]
As is this photo: [link]


Here's a photo someone else took of one of the wolves I photographed: [link]

If you have any information or even theories as to why these wolves have blue eyes, please comment!