Piebald White-tailed deer

I spend a lot of time at a big grasslands area known as EPCAL which is a former Navy Air Base / Grumman manufacturing plant which is currently owned by the Town and is relatively undeveloped. The expansive grasslands are home to a lot of cool species of bird but also big herds of deer (including up to 60 at one time) which is impressive for Long Island. Today I found this pie-bald deer... I was shooting from my car while driving down the old runway because these deer get spooked by hunters pretty easily so as soon as they saw my vehicle they were on the move - sorry for the crappy quality!

- Luke

Interesting animal, Luke. Most pie bald deer I've seen are mostly brown. I worked for 20 years in Maine as a wildlife biologist and probably looked at in the neighborhood of 20,000 deer in that time. Of those, only 10-15 were pie bald and most just showed a little bit. It is a genetic thing and sometimes they will be more of them in a certain area. A local sports writer always used to talk about the albino and pie bald deer in a particular place and I suspect that area just had a higher prevelance of the gene(s) so it expressed itself more. The white certainly helps with camo in the winter but not so much the rest of the year. Thanks for sharing.

Peter

I've seen a whole lot of them in the San Juan Islands in Washington state, Luke. I bet something like 20% of the deer on Orcas Island in particular are piebald. You've challenged their local perception with the single word "hunter," though. The San Juan population is desperately overrun due to lack of predators and a general prohibition of hunting. Biologists say it's a direct result of severe inbreeding and lack of new blood into the gene pool, but there are lots of other manifestations in addition to piebald. The rabbit population is in a similar genetic state due to a long-ago release of domestic Belgian hares, right down to the piebald.

Thanks for the thought food!

Years ago there was a herd of piebalds at the Patuxent National Wildlife Research Center here in MD. I haven't been there in years, but I'll bet the piebalds are still there since it's a no hunting area.