Animal rescuers found what is believed to have been a rare albino deer when they were called out to an animal ensnared by rope in East Sussex.

The completely white male fallow deer had its antlers caught in rope in a wooded area around Mayfield, near Crowborough.

The animal was thrashing around at the top of a 20ft drop to a stream when volunteers from East Sussex Wildlife Rescue and Ambulance Service (WRAS) arrived.

David Kenyon, director for England and Wales of the British Deer Society, said albino deers are "extremely rare".

He said: "The number of white deer are quite common, maybe in their low hundreds of thousands in the UK.

"But albino deer are extremely rare and there are probably just a handful of them in the UK. They are a genetic anomaly, just like an albino human, which again are rare."

Rescuers managed to get a net round the deer to secure the animal before one of them, Tony Neads, grabbed hold of the antlers and secured its head.

This allowed his colleague, Trevor Weeks, to grab its rear legs and secure the deer to the ground, while a colleague started cutting the rope from the antlers.

Mr Weeks said: "You have a 30 minute window once you have caught the deer to cut it free from these situations or they become too stressed and can die."

Once free from the rope, which rescuers removed from the tree completely, they uncovered the deer's head and allowed it to run back into the wild.