Welcome to the yard on the left. A place to contemplate, relax, and rant on the right.

3.16.2007

White Deer on the loose

White White-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus)

My parents have been talking about a 'white deer' roaming through their neighborhood, and we all thought they had been hitting the Mogen David or needed their meds adjusted, but they finally have captured the beast with a camera, and it's real!

In the Arthurian legends, the white hart or white stag is a mystical beast pursued by the Knights of the Round Table.
Sir Sagremor pursues a white hart in Les Merveilles de Rigomer, another is hunted in the Forest of Adventure in Chrétien's Erec and Enid, Floriant chases one to the castle of his foster mother Morgan Le Fay in Floriant et Florete, Percival cuts off the head of a white stag in the Didot Perceval, and Sir Gawain quests afer the white hart in book three of Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur.
It has been conjectured that the White Hart of Arthurian lore may have been drawn from Celtic myths, in which the stag was considered a sacred animal, or may be related to ancient Celtic stag cults known to have existed in early Britain.

Click here if this kind of thing excites you and you want to know more


In doing a Google search on white deer, I was amazed at the bandwidth devoted to these creatures. Here's a site the explains how white deer get to be white deer. It claims that 1 in 30,000 deer are absent of color.

Wisconsin seems to have a perpensity towards white beasts of lore, as shown in this photo of "Miracle" the white Buffalo, born in Janesville in 2006.


White Buffalo (Syncerus Caffer)

Any way you look at it, a white deer is good luck, so we'll take what we can get and leave it at that.

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