Photographer Spots Ultra Rare White Baby Reindeer on a Hike In Norway

In the snowy, white region of Northern Norway’s mountains, an extremely rare white baby reindeer was captured in photos recently. The vividly white reindeer wasn’t shy about heading straight over to the camera for some pictures.

The reindeer isn’t technically albino, because there is some dark coloring on the creature’s antlers, but it might as well be more special because it happens to perfectly receive camouflage from the surrounding environment.

The face this thing makes is so adorable and cute, who wouldn’t want to befriend it! The horns on this reindeer look a little bit curious, like maybe it had gotten into some kind of conflict. Maybe they just weren’t fully grown yet.

Oslo, Norway based photographer Mads Nordsveen was on a trip hiking with his friends when he laid eyes upon the nearly mythical creature. The 24-year-old photographer said: “I was walking in the mountains looking for nice landscapes for my travel photography when out of nowhere I saw this wonderful little creature.

“He came very close to me and we looked at each other straight in the eyes.”

The photographer continued to explain that the beautiful white reindeer was rather relaxed upon realizing that the human was friendly and calm. According to him, it was almost like the reindeer “posed for the camera.”

Mads described the little animal as very fun and curious, “like a little explorer.”

He explained that after some short amount of minutes, the mother of that baby reindeer, thankfully fully attached to her baby still, came out of the trees to see what was going on.

The little creature walked around a little bit before running back to its mother. Nordsveen continued to describe his experience as “very magical and a fairy tale moment.”

The photographer also took some photos of a Lynx and wolves in Northern Norway.

White reindeer actually do have a very uncommon genetic mutation that strips the pigment straight off of their fur, but it sounds like a rather useful and reasonable adaptation to have, because they blend right into the snow.

If they were technically albino, their eyes would also be stripped of pigmentation.

Reindeer are called caribou in North America, just slightly different from the ones that can be found in Europe, and there’s a reason why they were included in Christmas tales.

The reindeer is actually the only domesticated deer in the world, and it is largely considered to be the last animal to be domesticated, like horses have been domesticated by humans.

It’s really only “semi-domesticated.” In Northern Fennoscandia, which stretches across northern Sweden, Norway, and Finland, as well as the reindeer who live in the Kola Peninsula in Russia, reindeer are often semi-wild and semi-domestic, with some of them being ear-marked by owners. Ear marking animals is never a nice thought if you’re getting satisfaction from how adorable they are.

Several Arctic and Sub-Arctic people have herded and domesticated these creatures for centuries, according to DNA analysis.

If you think about the vast diversity present within all the different creatures on our planet, from mammals, to the completely foreign creatures of the deep sea, it seems like no alien life-form could hypothetically be stranger than what already exists on our planet. The deep sea looks completely alien.