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 three blue-eyed wolves between two unrelated packs.

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 is the darkest agouti I’ve seen.

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.