Last doe is all that remains of Mt. Madonna County Park's famed white deer herd
SANTA CLARA COUNTY -- It's the end of an era at Mt. Madonna County Park in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
The park's well-known and beloved herd of exotic white deer has been a huge attraction for decades, but has dwindled down to one last deer: a reclusive ten-year-old doe named Penelope.
"Penelope is very shy, so it is often times very difficult to see her. There's a brush area at the bottom of the enclosure. That's where she hangs out," said Ranger Long, one of her caretakers.
Ranger Long feeds Penelope in a large fenced in preserve near the park's headquarters. She gets a mixture of oats and slices of alfalfa hay bales.
But Penelope bides her time in a thicket of trees and usually doesn't come out to eat until sunset.
Her instinctive caution might come from the fact that Penelope is the sole survivor of a once large and exotic herd of white deer that was gifted to the park's previous landowner by William Randolph Hearst.
When Santa Clara County took over the land for a public park, the herd came with the territory.
"At the height of the herd at Mt. Madonna, there were 58 deer," Ranger Long said.
The deer — known as European fallow deer — were the park's biggest attraction for decades.
Visitor Katelyn Dietz remembers coming to see the deer as a child. Dietz recently came back with friends hoping for one last glimpse.
"They are so cute and a different variety of deer I haven't seen before. It's not common out in the wild, so it's just a nice way to see something new and different," Dietz explained.
Over time, the herd slowly died off from a combination of natural causes, disease, predators and even human poachers.
The Santa Clara County Parks Department decided years ago to not let the deer reproduce because the gene pool was too small to produce healthy offspring.
Ranger Long says the deer could not be released into the wild.
"She's not native to this area. And because they are so inbred, if she breeds with the native deer, it could create a weaker strain of deer," said Long. "And Fish and Wildlife wouldn't allow that."
The last male deer died of old age last year, leaving Penelope all by herself. Regular visits from a veterinarian show she's in good health.
"She's in a beautiful place, but the hard part is her being alone," Long said.
The only thing her caregivers can do now is make Penelope's life as comfortable as possible.
Ranger Long says Penelope still gets visitors daily, but unlike previous generations which grazed in the open inside their preserve, Penelope prefers seclusion in the trees.
That is where she will probably live out her final days on Mount Madonna as the last of the breed.