BENGALURU: Cauvery Wildlife Sanctuary staffers sighted a rare leucistic (partially white) sambar deer in the Sangama range on Tuesday.
Surendra A, Deputy Conservator of Forests, CWS, told TNIE that Sanjay Gubbi, senior scientist from Nature Conservation Foundation, had written to the staffers on August 31 about the rare sambar deer that had been caught on camera trap.
“My team and I sighted the animal on Tuesday during a field visit. It seems to be a female aged around 3-5 years. This is the first such sighting in this forest patch but is not new to the forests of Karnataka. Leucism is a genetic mutation and occurs naturally,” he said.
The forest staffers had also recorded a white wild peafowl in the forest patch recently, he added. Gubbi stated in his letter that the white form sambar (Rusa unicolour) at the sanctuary was captured during their camera trap work on leopards. The team documented the rare occurrence of a leucistic sambar in the Hyra beat of Sangama Range on Jan 17, 2023.