Nature Done Wright

     A friend of this blog gave me a tip about a white deer at the McFaul Environmental Center in Wyckoff (Thanks, Tom!).

   I pitched the idea of doing a story on the deer and then did the reporting this week.

   Sure enough, there’s a piebald deer in the white-tailed deer exhibit at the environmental center.

   I wrote this story on Page L-3 of The Record today, and filmed the video below.

   If you look closely, you can see that the deer not only is mostly white as the result of a fairly rare genetic condition, but it has other abnormalities — most noticeably a bad overbite as the result of a slightly misshapen head.

   These deer are rare because of the genetics, but they are also rare because they do poorly in the wild.

   This unnamed female, now over one year old, seems quite docile and hangs out with the other white-tailed deer in the enclosure.   

   Unless there’s snow on the ground, they tend to stick out.

    And their abnormalities, which can include bad hooves, bad hearing and a bad sense of smell, make them easy prey for predators.

Here’s the video: