I was waiting for Uber outside of work, and I’m absently looking ahead across the street, and I see movement in the trees. A deer. And another deer. And a… huh? What was that? An albino deer? Very hard to see details at that distance. Fours legs, white body-- no wait, white body and brown head.
I’ve heard of albino animals. I’ve heard of leucistic animals with white fur and normal eyes. But splotchy white patterns are a mutation characteristic of domestic animals.
But what else could it be, if not a deer? It sure wasn’t a dog. Someone’s pet goat? What the heck would a random goat be doing there? Now it was right next to the unquestionably-a-fawn. It was the same size, the same shape, walked the same way.
My friends, I have a phobia of busy streets. If I can see cars coming, I want nothing to do with the road. I will only cross in the middle at extreme need, and I will be sweating and hyperventilating when I get there. But there was a weird deer to see, there was a break in the traffic, and I dashed to the other side.
Professor Google, self-appointed expert on everything, tells me my exciting freak of nature is not quite as freak as I thought, insofar as they’re a named phenomena. They’re called piebald deer (not to be confused with Piebald the Cat, currently sleeping on my desk). Still fairly rare, though. And still cool to see.
I’ve seen them. A few times.
Car vs. Deer. My car hit and killed a deer with a large white blotch on his hip.
I have no cite for this. Except seasoned deer hunters. The odd coloring comes from over population(of deer) in a given area.
Mr.Wrekker has a taxidermied deer head and shoulders that is nearly black.
They’ve become somewhat common in central New York. There was a large military storage depot in the Finger Lakes region. It had a lot of land but not a lot of military activity. So there were plenty of deer living on the property.
Some of the deer developed white fur. They weren’t albinos; they just had white patches that covered most of their body.
The local commander issued orders that while people could hunt the regularly colored deer, the white deer could not be shot. And natural selection took its course and the number of white deer increased.
