truck driver wrote:
There is a nice size herd of them in up state New York on a gov instillation. I can't remember the name of the town but I almost wrecked my truck the first time I saw them roaming around inside the fence.
Great picture Guy.
This is in line with what I've seen. I first saw piebald deer in Maryland, on an isolated Navy base. The herd there was small and had limited interaction with the surrounding deer population thanks to a tall chain link fence topped by barbed wire. That small, somewhat isolated population had quite a few piebald deer and there was a photo of an all white, or nearly all white buck that had lived there several years earlier.
This little gal I photographed yesterday is in a small herd, maybe 12 - 20 deer, on an island in the Columbia River. They CAN swim to shore, but I don't think they do very often. It's deep and a bit of a ways. There's no hunting or even hiking allowed on the island, it's essentially just a little nature sanctuary with a small, isolated mule deer population.
I'm no genetics guru, but I'm thinking this piebald stuff is likely a recessive gene, and in-breeding of the small herds produces at least some of these piebald deer.
Guy