For three seasons now, Kevin O’Brien and his uncle and cousins, who all hunt in the same area of northwest Wisconsin, have been seeing and photographing a ghostly deer. Lots of whitetail bucks “ghost” us, but I’m talking about color. This frosty whitetail doesn’t seem to fit easily into any of the well-known color phases of deer.
In 2024, Kevin contacted wildlife biologists with Wisconsin DNR and other organizations. In e-mail chains, they shared thoughts about how to categorize the deer, though this did not appear to be based on any previous known cases of such deer. One of the biologists referred Kevin to an NDA article about albino, piebald and melanistic deer. As sightings of the unique buck continued into this year, Kevin reached out to me and shared photos of the unusual deer.
We receive photos of every kind of weird deer you can imagine, and I can’t recall ever seeing another deer like this silver deer of Wisconsin. It first showed up in 2023 as a button buck, reappeared on trail-cameras as a yearling, and has been sighted from deer stands this fall. Kevin said the silver buck is becoming commonplace on trail-cameras.
The deer does not appear to be just a piebald or melanistic deer. One Wisconsin biologist suggested it was a “gray phase” melanistic deer, but melanism involves a lot of dark, black hair over most of the body. Notably, melanistic deer usually lack white patches of hair on the face and neck. The silver deer, like most whitetails, has them. Even lighter cases of melanism are still very dark gray, not frosty silver. Is this deer just a slight variation of one of these known genetic misfires in coloration, or something entirely unique? Hoping to find someone who could identify the deer more definitively, I started checking around.
A Doe Named “Crystal”
I contacted David Osborn, a Georgia DMAP biologist who formerly served as the deer research coordinator at the University of Georgia Deer Lab. David is one of the most knowledgeable people I know about deer color phases. The silver buck reminded David of a doe named Crystal that lived for 10 years at the UGA Deer Lab. Born as a piebald fawn, Crystal was taken from the wild by a member of the public and given to a veterinarian, who called UGA.
“When I got her, she was completely white with a brown spot on the back of her neck, a brown spot just above her tail, and gray eyes,” said David. “She had no obvious deleterious characteristics sometimes associated with piebaldism. Other than her color, she appeared normal. Anyone who saw her would think she was a classic piebald.
“When Crystal molted into her adult pelage, she no longer was a piebald. She went from almost all white to no white at all. The rest of her life, she had unique summer and winter colors. In summer, you could not distinguish her from any other of 30-plus does in her pen, unless you were close enough to see her gray eyes. However, in winter, she was almost silver.
“I was aware of albinos, piebalds, and the white deer at the Seneca Army Depot in New York. However, I could not explain Crystal,” said David. “All these years later, I have no understanding of why Crystal was a piebald, then not a piebald. Why she was silver in winter and red in summer. I have no understanding of the unique color of this Wisconsin deer, either.”
The “Glacier” Blacktail
Next, I reached out to Jim Heffelfinger, a wildlife biologist and wildlife science coordinator with the Arizona Game & Fish Department, who is an outstanding curator of odd deer facts and weird deer. Jim recalled having seen a photo of a similar colored Sitka black-tailed deer, and he connected me with Karin McCoy, a retired wildlife biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish & Game. Karin shared a photo taken from a helicopter in August 2012.
Wildlife biologist Phil Mooney spotted the unusual Sitka black-tailed deer on Baranof Island in the Alaska Panhandle. It was running in a group of other normal-colored bucks and does and was described as “a very light, bluish gray.” A report noted that when a black bear has a silver phase, it is called a “glacier bear,” so this Sitka blacktail became known as the “Glacier deer.”
The report also referred to this color pattern as a recessive gene, like piebaldism and melanism. The Glacier-colored blacktail certainly looks very close to Kevin’s silver whitetail.
So What is the Silver Deer?
Piebald deer come in many forms, with no two piebald deer just alike. They are a patchwork of pure white and “deer” brown – but rarely a blend of the two that comes out gray or silver. Kevin O’Brien’s Wisconsin deer has some plain brown on its legs, but the rest is a consistent silver. It shows none of the body deformities that sometimes come with piebald condition, such as a crooked spine, short legs, or overbite.
However, on November 17, 2024, the buck walked very close to a trail-camera monitoring a food plot, triggering a closeup photo of its neck and back (below). The portion in direct sunlight reveals the coat is actually a blend of pure white hairs and brown (or black) hairs. But they are so well distributed that from a distance the buck appears frosty gray – except for its legs.
Unless the silver buck is harvested by a hunter or dies of some other cause, we won’t get a closer look at his hide. And that’s less likely because Kevin and his uncle and cousins have put the deer off limits and asked neighbors to consider protecting him for now as well. As far as Kevin knows, the buck survived the 9-day rifle season over Thanksgiving.
Will they continue protecting the buck next year? Kevin said he didn’t know, and with wolves in the area, there’s no guarantee they can protect the buck forever. “We really have to discuss amongst us,” he said. “Do we want to take him or just see what happens to him?”
For now, it does not seem that the silver buck is a true piebald or truly melanistic. It is not albino, either, which is a complete lack of pigment – even eye color. He appears to be some other kind of anomaly that is even more rare.
“What I took from Crystal is that we are not as smart as we think we are when it comes to deer biology,” said David Osborn. “There still are things that we simply don’t know.”
In the case of the silver whitetail of Wisconsin, David may have the best answer at this point: We simply do not know.