A Westlake resident recently submitted Rebecca Steele's photo of a white deer spotted in their neighborhood. They wanted to know, "Is this an albino?" With Rebecca's permission, we thought we'd share her great photo and the response to the question from Wildlife Rehabilitation Specialist Amy LeMonds here on our blog.
This is actually more common than you might think. It is a white-tailed deer and is not albino. The term for the coloring is "piebald." Albinos are much more rare (genetically speaking). Our Wildlife Education & Rehabilitation Program gets reports on these deer every year and we have confirmed the presence of quite a few piebalds in the Rocky River Reservation.
Point of interest: if there were more natural predators to deer, piebalds would likely be less common because they would stand out in their environment and be spotted by predators more easily. -Amy LeMonds
This time of year, the piebalds might have the camouflage advantage in all this snow! Piebald coloring is an inherited genetic trait and can range from very slight patches of white hair to almost totally white coats. Unlike true albinos, piebald deer have brown eyes and black hooves. Piebald deer are rare (around 1% of the population) but widely documented and much more common than albinos.
Update: new photo (above) taken in January snow, by Jeanne Palmer, also in Westlake. Looks like the same deer.
2 comments:
I saw this deer at Lutheran Home in Westlake on Dover Rd. on Feb 12 at 5 in the morning. But I thought the speckling was more on the shoulders. Could there be 2?.....
Yes, there may be several in the area.
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