Last week, a truck driver in California came screeching to a halt when he saw a white animal lying in the road up ahead.
As he approached, he realized it was a fawn — and her fur was completely white.“The finder said he thought she was a lamb at first because of her snowy white coat,” Shasta Stratton-Quirk, of the Kindred Spirits Fawn Rescue in Loomis, California, told The Dodo. The rescue took the orphan in right away.
While most fawns lose their white spots as they age, this fawn will stay white since she is albino.
It’s not unheard of for albino deer to be found in the wild among a herd of brown deer, but it’s uncommon to find one so young without their mother, the rescue said.
This is the first albino fawn to ever come into their care — and the little 3-week-old deer was lucky she hadn’t been injured by a car.
The fawn’s caretakers have nicknamed her Spirit.
Spirit is already showing her determination to grow strong — and she has a trained team of wildlife rehabilitators checking on her every step of the way. The shelter’s president, Diane Nicholas, rescues orphaned fawns each year who aren’t old enough to survive on their own.
“She is currently doing very well,” Stratton-Quirk added. “She is eating and gaining weight!”
Over the next six months, Spirit’s rescuers will help her learn how to forage for her own food and socialize with other deer in hopes she’ll be able to be released to the wild.
Since there are already established groups of deer in the area with albinism, Spirit is expected to be just fine.
1 thought on “Guy Finds Tiny White Baby Deer Stranded in the Middle of the Road”
How common is albinism in deer? I suspect that the mother doe abandoned the albino fawn thinking that it was not hers.