I totally agree. We've looked at countless museum specimens and have seen what look like blacktails come from unicolor range and vice versa.

Our "mottled" blacktails have a longer, blacker tail than most I've seen, but their bellies are heavily marked with black, so who knows?

What's for certain is that wild specimens are extremely variable and that people's idea of what a "classic" blacktail or a "classic" unicolor is just doesn't apply to wild populations the way we think they do.

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