Last night my brother was driving home and saw a black young buck with another brown buck and two other deer (females). All were very young. They also had a beagle walking with them along the side of the road. This was less than ONE mile from our home. In between my my mothers property and mine is a 2,200 acre hunting reserve.

So I tried to research black deer and stumbled upon “melanistic whitetail deer”.

So at least one but maybe two melanistic deer live in our area.

Killing only non-melanistic members of a species, if taken to its logical extreme, could well lead to the melanistic becoming the common and the non-melanistic the rare ones!

Here is a link to an article on my area.

http://www.woodlandhabitat.com/articles/black-squirrels.htm

I grew up in Lakeside Park, but all the cities mentioned are bordering each other in Northern Kentucky, and considered part of the “Greater Cincinnati” area, though the black squirrels do not seem to make it across the river to the actual Cincinnati city limits.

Therefore, the “melanistic squirrels” phrase above is a hyperlink, and you get to that post by clicking on it.

In the city I grew up in, in Northern Kentucky, you had just as much a shot of seeing a black squirrel as you did a grey one. I am not exagerrating. My friends from Ohio were always amazed by this.

I don’t know—I’m not knowledgeable enough about melanistic deer to know what their proper habitat is.

Just a guess.

Great story, though, DWA.