Deer nonchalantly swimming 1 mile across the Carquinez Straits......

Yes, it's a deer!!! No I've never ever seen one swimming! (we've seen river otters, beavers, and sea lions in the water here before). This is open water, with swift currents, but the deer is acting like an accomplished swimmer!

Appears to be a full-grown, healthy California Black-tailed Deer. Is is a doe or a male with dropped antlers?

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-tailed_deer

...could this fuzzy pass as a sighting of the Loch Ness Monster? Terrible cell phone video quality :-P then, on top of that, YT has a compression algorithm that makes it slightly fuzzy too...

The deer was not panicked---it appeared calm and had many opportunities to climb out of the water or rest in shallow water. Instead the deer kept swimming! So tenacious!

We don't know where it came from, however it was much further out before we saw what it was. The Carquinez Straits is more than a mile wide here... the deer may have come from Benicia, directly across the Straits, or from further up the Delta, or it may have come from our side of the water, around Martinez. I don't know!

(My brother and I at first thought it was a bird; what kind of bird? Well, it's in the water and it's not dead, so it's an aquatic bird! That was helpful, right?)