Murrysville trail camera catches rare, unique piebald buck

The wildlife trail cameras set up by Bill Powers of Murrysville keep catching some of the area’s more elusive creatures.

On Thursday, one of his PixCams cameras recorded a brief shot of a piebald white-tailed buck moving through the woods. Powers prefers not to identify the locations of his cameras.

The piebald condition is an inherited trait and is sometimes confused with albino deer. Piebald produces a mix of the traditional brown coat, speckled with white, non-pigmented blotches across the body, according to the Pennsylvania Game Commission. In some instances, piebald deer can be nearly all white — but if they have brown eyes and black hooves, they’re not albino.

Piebald deer make up less than 1% of the state’s deer population, according to game commission biologist J.T. Fleegle.

“Having a white or partly white coat isn’t the only thing that makes piebald deer different,” Fleegle wrote in a game commission series on myths and legends about white-tailed deer. “They also typically have some other abnormality that may include dorsal bowing of the nose (Roman nose), short legs, curving of the spine, deviated limb joints (turned feet), and internal organ malformations. Those with severe defects die at birth or shortly after.”

Traditional whitetails can mate with piebalds, producing either type of deer, but Fleegle said all attempted matings of two piebald deer have failed to produce offspring.