14-year-old Hunter Bags Ultra Rare Black Whitetail Buck
OutdoorHub Reporters 12.15.15
An all-black whitetail deer is the harvest of a lifetime, but for 14-year-old Brooke Bateman of Dallas, it was just her first buck.
The young hunter bagged the extremely rare animal while hunting with her father Mike Bateman on a Stephens County lease in Texas late last month. According to The Dallas Morning News, at first the pair mistook the deer for an Angus calf. Upon closer inspection, the Batemans realized they were looking at a deer so rare that many hunters never even heard of it, much less seen one.
They were conflicted over whether they should shoot it. There is no law in Texas against the harvest of melanistic black deer, and wildlife officials do not especially encourage hunters to leave the deer alone. Still, Mike Bateman had to call a friend to help him decide. As the deer neared within 120 yards, he decided to have his daughter take the shot.
“It was nerve-racking, but I knew I could do it,” Brooke told The Dallas Morning News. “At first I was so excited that I couldn’t pull the trigger. Dad helped me calm down with deep breaths. I found the deer in the scope again, took a deep breath and shot. The deer fell over backwards. It was awesome. I love hunting with my dad.”
With that, the black buck was hers. It was not entirely luck that led the father and daughter to the black deer, though. Had the Batemans been hunting anywhere else in North America, their odds of running into a black whitetail buck would have been astronomically low. However, central Texas has the highest population of black deer in the world.
The condition that makes the deer black in color is called melanism, which can be thought of as the opposite of albinism. Whereas albinism is the complete or partial absence of pigment in the skin, melanism is characterized by the excessive production of the dark-colored pigment melanin. Scientists believe that certain animals have adapted for the condition to blend in better with dark environments, such as black panthers, squirrels, and coral snakes. It may be the same for whitetail deer. Researchers in Texas believe that the state has an unusually high number of black deer because the animals all come from a drainage with a lower amount of light due to tree cover and, over time, adapted to their environment.
“Even though we have more melanistic deer here than in the whole world,” researcher John Baccus told the Texas Parks and Wildlife Magazine in 2005, “they’re still extremely rare. It’s the rarest of the white-tailed deer, even rarer than the big-antlered deer. I get the harvest records every year from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, and generally, there are fewer than five of these melanistic deer that are harvested in any given year.”
Generally, just one black deer is harvested every year in Texas. It is not known how many are bagged in other parts of the country, but researchers say it is possibly the least seen deer in North America.
Albino deer occur roughly one in 30,000. Melanistic deer are even rarer.
It’s not bad for a first buck. Brooke Bateman said her deer drew quite a crowd when she brought it to the locker plant in Breckinridge. Even game wardens dropped by to get a glimpse of the strange deer.
Have you seen any of these unique black deer? Let us know in the comments below.
