This time of year, families across much of the country begin piling into the car for an evening to go look at Christmas lights. In northern Wisconsin, they are looking for white deer.
“They are breath-taking,” said Amy Sprecher, who lives in southern Wisconsin and advocates to protect white deer. “The state does see a tourism bump from (the rare deer). They are keeping Boulder Junction in business.”
White deer – like one shot by a hunter in South Georgia earlier this month or another one photographed this week by another man in South Georgia – are rare, perhaps 1 in 20,000. More than a dozen states have laws to protect them, according to Sprecher, and certain areas seem to have more white deer than others.
Some white deer are true albino and have pink or red eyes and a pink nose, but most are not. Called “all white” or “white” deer, a white-tailed deer must receive a recessive gene from both parents to have the unique lack of color. Wisconsin, which has protected white deer since 1942, has at least two herds with the trait; perhaps the largest white herd in the country is in Seneca, N.Y., but those deer are fenced in on an old Army depot.
In the South, nature-watchers got excited this fall when South Georgia hunter Sam Hogan brought home a 4-point white deer from a hunting trip in Tift County in early November. The deer weighed about 140 pounds, according to WALB.
A month later, Chad Etheridge, the president of Growing America, spotted a white deer in his Albany, Ga. back yard. Etheridge snapped photos and watched as the deer grazed at the edge of the woods.
“I’ve always wanted to see a white deer, but in all my time in the woods, I've never seen one,” Etheridge said. “Avid hunters who spend years in the woods don’t get the chance to see one. It blew my mind.”
Brent Howz, a wildlife biologist with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, has gotten a lot of questions about white deer this month, but hasn’t heard of any other sightings, he said. Over the years, he’s heard periodic reports of white or piebald deer, but has never seen an albino deer himself.
“I won’t say we’ve been getting more reports, but there’s definitely more buzz,” Howz said. “In some places, people are seeing more deer, and they are curious about the reports of white ones. But it is a genetic abnormality and very rare.”
Howz expects that people are talking more about white deer because more people carry cameras and post to social media – not because there are more white deer. But the overall deer population seems to be on the rise in areas with large farms and enough woods to support deer, but not enough for a lot of hunting. In those areas, the DNR has seen more applications for Crop Damage Permits, which allows a farmer to hunt out of season in order to control a deer population that is damaging his crops.
People are just fascinated by the rare deer, said Sprecher, who has a small group of white deer that live on her property.
In 2008, Wisconsin began to allow limited hunting of white deer to control chronic wasting disease. When a buck was shot and killed last year, Sprecher started a campaign to give the deer full protection across the entire state.
The story caught media attention across the globe and required the local CBS affiliate to assign another page to online comments about the issue.
“How many people have ever seen a white deer?” Sprecher asked. “If you do, you never forget it.”
Below are some of the pictures Etheridge took this past weekend. 
a doe and what looks like her yearling come out first
the white doe hangs back
finally coming out into the open
watching the other two walk off
she spends about 10 minutes eating before heading off to catch back up with the others