A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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piebald
Piebald describes an animal with irregular patches of white and one other color, usually black, with hard-edged boundaries between them. It is caused by pigment cells failing to reach parts of the skin during development, which is why the white is where it is rather than being scattered. Horses, cattle, deer, dogs, and birds all show it, and in a horse the strict usage is that piebald means black and white specifically.
Etymology
The word is built from two older English words and both halves have moved. Pie is the magpie, which is where the bird’s black-and-white pattern comes in, and it is the same pie in magpie and in the old English name for the oystercatcher, the sea pie. Bald meant having a white patch, not hairless, which is also why a bald eagle has a full head of feathers.
Notes
The counterpart term is skewbald, meaning white with any color other than black, and an animal that is both is a tricolor. Piebald patterning is useful to biologists because the boundaries record where pigment cells stopped migrating, so the pattern is a map of an early developmental process rather than a decoration.