Seeing a white-tailed deer in the Ozarks is anything but unusual.
But a black white-tailed deer? That’s definitely out of the ordinary.
On the way home from work late one afternoon last week, I was on the dirt road only a couple of hundred yards from our driveway and I saw a deer run across the roadway. That wouldn’t normally be noteworthy, as deer are common in the wooded, sparsely-populated area in which my wife Wendy and I live.
But this was different. I did a major double-take, because the dang thing was black! Completely caught off guard, I fumbled around and got my camera out of its bag as fast as I could, and I pulled the truck up to where the animal had entered the forest in hopes of documenting its existence.
But as deer do, this one had quickly disappeared into its surroundings and I moved on without photographic evidence. Naturally, the encounter was the first thing I mentioned to Wendy when I got home, and I quickly consulted the Internet to find out if I was crazy or had seen something unusual that had a logical explanation.
As it turns out, black white-tailed deer do indeed exist. Their dark color is a result of a condition called melanism, a recessive genetic mutation that causes their bodies to produce too much of the pigment melanin. Sometimes, melanistic white-tailed deer appear sort of chocolate brown, while other times they’re closer to black.
So what I had seen while I was on auto-pilot doing something I had done a thousand times before was a melanistic white-tailed deer. Who knew?
The sighting was startling, to say the least, and really got my attention. The black deer I saw was medium-sized and had no antlers, so I assume it was a doe.
Of course, albino white-tailed deer also exist, and once in a while a snow white deer is spotted in Texas County or other nearby locations. Their condition is basically the opposite of their black counterparts; they’re white due to a lack of melanin in their systems.
But melanistic deer are much more rare than albino, and I pretty much verified that as I asked people if they had ever seen one. Almost everyone replied that they hadn’t even heard of it, let alone seen one, but several brought up how they or someone they knew had seen an albino deer.
For the record, black white-tailed deer have been reported in 29 states, according to an online source. And there are also piebald deer, which bear the standard brown coloration combined with white spots or blotches, almost like a horse. Not surprisingly, they’re also reportedly far more common than their melanistic cousins.
It’s worth noting that many other animals can be melanistic. One of the most famous (or maybe infamous) in North America are cougars (often called mountain lions in the Midwest), which are usually referred to as black panthers.
When we lived in the Northeast Georgia mountains in the 2000s, Wendy and I each saw a black panther. Strangely, most governmental agencies insist no such thing exists in the U.S., including the Missouri Department of Conservation.
Here’s the official statement from the MDC’s “Mountain Lions in Missouri” booklet (which can be viewed online): “The fact is, no species of large black cat occurs in the United States. Only two species of large black cat are sometimes all black, or melanistic: the leopard (Panthera pardus), found in Africa and Asia, and the jaguar (Panthera onca), of South America, Central America and Mexico.”
That, of course, goes directly against what me and my wife eye-witnessed, and I’ve spoken to multiple people who live in the Ozarks who would also beg to differ.
Anyway, black deer can now be added to the list of rather exotic animals Wendy and I have sighted in our little section of Texas County, along with a cougar (we’ve both seen one, and we figure it was probably the same cat) and a gray wolf (Wendy saw that, as I wrote about in June of 2022).
She’s luckier than me in this regard, because she has also seen an albino deer during a float trip a few years ago on the Jacks Fork River. But that’s OK with me, because my turn might come again tomorrow.
When you live in a place where wildlife is as abundant as it is in the Ozarks, you just never know.
Doug Davison is a writer, photographer and newsroom assistant for the Houston Herald. Email: ddavison@houstonherald.com.
