We Spot the Seneca White Deer

We were just driving along, minding our own business, when I saw something out of the corner of my eye. Looked like a mountain goat. Couldn’t have been a mountain goat. The Finger Lakes region isn’t mountain goat country.

“Did you see that?” I asked Lisa.

“See what?”

“That,” I pointed to another white animal grazing behind the fence of the old Seneca Army Depot. “What is that?”

“It looks like a white deer.”

“It can’t be a white deer!”

It was definitely a white deer, Wikipedia told my phone. They’re not albino, they have a recessive white fur trait. What the hell?

Turns out, there was a herd of these back in the day that got fenced in when the army depot went in. They’ve never really had predators, thanks to the fence. Then they received preferential treatment by soldiers on the base … that only shot the normal brown ones. Now there are a bunch of them and they even have their own preservation society. Wild.

They also have their own hunting season, managed by the US Army, of course. Got to thin the herd, control the population, all that shit. Just don’t open the fence!