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While on patrol Monday, a Hillsborough police officer spotted a rare sight: an albino fawn munching on grass.
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The North Carolina Zoo and Botanical Gardens estimates that about one in 30,000 white-tailed fawns are albino.
But for Hillsborough, a white deer spotting isn’t uncommon, a town spokesperson told The News & Observer. Residents frequently post photos of white deer in local Facebook groups.
Hence the Hillsborough Police Department’s nonchalant caption opener when it posted a video of the albino fawn on Facebook Monday.
“Just some Hillsborough wildlife,” the department wrote.
Jan Hawkins, department head of Clinical Sciences at N.C. State’s College of Veterinary Medicine, told The N&O that for deer, the albino trait is recessive. Fawn must receive the gene from both the mother and father to exhibit the trait.
There’s a disadvantage to being an albino deer, as they stand out to predators and hunters, Hawkins said. Because albino deer lack camouflage and their eyes lack protective pigment — making them sensitive to light and struggle to detect movement — many of them die young, according to the N.C. Zoo.
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It’s more common for fawn to be piebald, born with white and brown spots, Hawkins said. But it’s still rare: the N.C. Zoo estimates that 1 in 1,000 white-tailed deer exhibit leucism, or being piebald.
In the Police Department’s video, a brown buck a couple of dozen feet from the white deer could be seen cleaning the face of a fawn with a brown body and white spots.
The albino deer’s pink ears and pink nose are clearly visible in the Police Department’s video. But Hawkins said he hasn’t come across hard data to say whether the Hillsborough area has more albino deer than usual. It’s possible that other white deer sightings are not albino, just piebald.
Hawkins couldn’t rule out the possibility of a higher albino or white deer incidence in Hillsborough. Rapid growth in the Triangle has segregated diverse populations of deer by “concrete jungles,” thinning the genetic pool and making inbreeding more frequent, he said.
“Some traits could show back up if a population was more narrow, and they don’t have as many new animals coming in,” Hawkins said. “It’s always possible. It’s all back to genetics.”
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