Piebald Mule Deer

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jadewolf

jadewolf

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So these are some older shots of mine, but seeing this deer was such a unique experience years ago that I wanted to share anyway.

I was in Arches National Park in winter of 2016, doing some landscape shots. But as I was walking to one of the arches, there was some movement alongside the trail. I turned to look and it was a small group of deer. It took a moment, because she blended in so well with the red rocks and the snow, but I spotted this piebald mule deer doe among them. All I had with me was my old D200 with a wide angle prime and my 70-200 f/2.8 in my backpack. So I scrambled to very, very quietly pull out the longer lens and swap them. Thankfully, the deer were not terribly shy and hung around long enough for me to grab a couple shots of the white doe.

Wasn't the most technically perfect set of wildlife photos, but with piebald deer being so uncommon (there's no stats on mule deer, but less than 2% of whitetails are piebald), I was just thrilled to have any photos of one!
 
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jadewolf said:
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View attachment 45639
So these are some older shots of mine, but seeing this deer was such a unique experience years ago that I wanted to share anyway.

I was in Arches National Park in winter of 2016, doing some landscape shots. But as I was walking to one of the arches, there was some movement alongside the trail. I turned to look and it was a small group of deer. It took a moment, because she blended in so well with the red rocks and the snow, but I spotted this piebald mule deer doe among them. All I had with me was my old D200 with a wide angle prime and my 70-200 f/2.8 in my backpack. So I scrambled to very, very quietly pull out the longer lens and swap them. Thankfully, the deer were not terribly shy and hung around long enough for me to grab a couple shots of the white doe.

Wasn't the most technically perfect set of wildlife photos, but with piebald deer being so uncommon (there's no stats on mule deer, but less than 2% of whitetails are piebald), I was just thrilled to have any photos of one!
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Nice inclusion of the white coat in the red color of the rocks 👏
 
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M R Opp said:
Wow! We have a lot of mulies in CO, but I have never seen one like that!
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Yeah, I've never seen another report of a piebald mulie other than this one. Photos of piebald white-tails show up reasonably often, but not mulies! Pretty cool sight, for sure!
Rick S said:
Beautiful. Thanks for finding it and sharing the link.
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Thank you!
Charles Loy said:
Fantastic! Old camera model, D200. (y)
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Yup! That was my workhorse for about ten years until I got my D500. It was a great little camera! I still have it, though I converted it to IR now.
PhD69 said:
Nice inclusion of the white coat in the red color of the rocks 👏
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Thank you! I almost missed her because of it, oddly enough. This was late December, so there was snow all over the ground and she blended in almost perfectly with the white snow on red rocks. I saw the other, regular colored deer in the herd, but then suddenly a patch of snow was moving and it turned out to be her! I legit gasped when I realized what I was looking at. One of the coolest wildlife finds I've ever encountered.

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