By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
When the buck first emerged from the treeline, Ryan Bartlett didn’t quite believe his eyes. On the beach in front of him was a deer, but one unlike any he had ever seen before.
He was hunting with his father on opening day of deer season, August 1, and was scanning the treeline on the outer shore of Kruzof Island.
“And all of a sudden it comes through this dark opening in the woods, just a white face,” Bartlett said. “My thought was there’s a deer, it has trash on its face. It looked like a paper plate, it was bleached white. It was insane. It finally walks out onto the beach and we’re looking at it and we’re dumbfounded and my dad’s like, ‘It’s a piebald deer!’ So my heart drops, I’m all excited to see this freak of nature.”
Ryan Bartlett holds up a one-eyed piebald Sitka black tail deer he bagged on a recent hunting trip. The deer, which have a genetic defect that causes white coloration and deformities, are a rare sight. (Photo provided)
It had a solid white face and a streak of white velvet running up one antler. He felled the deer with a single shot, and soon discovered even more odd things about this animal. In addition to its unusual coloration the deer sported asymmetrical antlers and had only one eye.
While other piebald animals have been observed in Alaska, they’re unusual in Southeast.
“Yours is the first case I can recall in a deer in Southeast but not the first case in a cervid or Alaskan mammal,” Department of Fish and Game wildlife veterinarian Kimberlee Beckmen wrote in an email to Sitka’s ADFG office on August 9.
Bartlett recalled his observations about the deer as he dressed it out on the beach on the day of the hunt.
“It’s just bizarre, it’s missing an eye, and that eye was on its left hand side which is the eye that would have seen us walking down the beach toward us,” he said. “There was no extremely striking thing about the skeleton. I will say when I caped out the head it had these pockets by its nose full of yellow dust, almost like pollen on either side and I’ve never seen that before.”
Once the deer was on the ground, the hunter noticed that the buck, which from its size appeared to be a two-year old, didn’t have the muscle mass typical for a deer in August.
“The deer was very skinny and lean – well I won’t say lean – because it had fat, it just didn’t have muscle growth like a normal deer would on August 1,” he said.
Not surprisingly, the meat from the animal was different too. The backstrap meat was too tough to eat without grinding and, once ground, the rich aroma typical of fresh red meat was absent as well – it was scentless, Bartlett said.
Beckmen noted in her email that piebald animals often have a variety of genetic abnormalities which make survival difficult.
“The piebald gene in many species carries other deleterious genes with it, so it is typically selected against and has poor survival to reproduction,” Beckmen wrote. “Don’t know about the eye issue but having a hypoplasia or aplasia of another organ could be another sign of genetic or in utero damage.”
In other species, she noted, the piebald gene carries fatal implications.
“For example, a piebald Alaska husky with a gingival tag will also be a ‘wheezer’ which is a tracheal defect that is often fatal. An all-white reindeer with a hypoplastic mandible does not have a normal immune system and will die once it gets an infection,” she said.
Bartlett has hunted with his father since he was a child, and in a normal year they would stalk deer in the high country, he said. But he had a serious knee injury that kept them close to the beaches this year.
By the time the piebald buck stepped out of the woods and onto the beach, the hunters had already spotted two dozen does feeding in the tall grass, Bartlett remembered.
“I was growing up on subsistence, in a subsistence household,” said Bartlett, a 2021 Sitka High School graduate who hunts with his father and family friend, Terry Perencevich. “I was following my dad and Terry through the woods before I was strong enough to carry a gun all day. I was just learning the ropes and I kind of took all that to heart and I’m big on people doing things the right way when it comes to getting your tags, doing it legal, but I’m all for people harvesting animals and taking them the correct way, and living that subsistence lifestyle. I think it’s a really neat thing Sitka has to offer.”
He plans to attend a carpentry school in Fairbanks next fall, but wherever he goes he plans to continue his hunting adventures.
“In an ideal world, I wouldn’t buy meat in the store at all,” he said.
