Sunday, July 15, 2007
On our way back home tonight, we ended up driving up the east shore of Seneca Lake, and as we passed Sampson State Park and the old Seneca Army Depot I mentioned reading that there was a rare herd of white deer on the Army Depot property, to which Ann responded that I'd said that before but we'd yet to see any white deer.
Looks like it was our lucky night, because a few minutes later she hollered that she'd seen one!
Took a while to get turned around (and along the way we saw many brown deer) but when we did, there were two white deer in the area where she'd seen the first one. We stopped and watched them for a few minutes; while we were there, several other cars stopped too. Apparently the white deer are quite a draw!
From what I've been able to find out, there is a herd of approximately 300 white deer on the closed 10600 acre military base. When 7500 acres of the property was fenced in by the military in the mid-1900's, the existing herds of deer were geographically confined and restricted breeding caused expression of a recessive gene for white coats. A base commander in the 1950's spotted a white buck and ordered the white deer protected from hunting, and over time the white coats became more and more prevalent, resulting in the largest herd of white deer in the world.
Seneca County is currently looking at various ways to use the land. There's a not-for-profit organization, Seneca White Deer Inc, devoted to saving as much of the Depot as possible for a conservation area and military museum.
JMH
