Red deer

Name and taxonomy

Carl Linnaeus named the species Cervus elaphus in 1758, and the type locality is southern Sweden. Cervus is the Latin word for a deer, and elaphus is probably from the Greek word for one. The species sits in the family Cervidae and the order Artiodactyla, the even-toed hoofed mammals. Local names are many: hart and stag in English, maral in Turkish and Mongolian, and cerf in French. GBIF lists more than fifty vernacular names for the species in dozens of languages.

For a long time biologists treated the red deer and the North American elk, or wapiti, as one species. The two breed freely in captivity and give fertile young, which seemed to settle the question. Genetic work now separates them, and the elk is Cervus canadensis. The Central Asian deer may also be a species of their own, Cervus hanglu, though not every study agrees. Within the red deer, the IUCN once listed nine subspecies, including the Barbary stag of North Africa and the Corsican red deer.

Evolution and relatives

The ancestor of the red deer probably came from central Asia, and one study points to the Tarim region of China. Red deer reached Europe about 900,000 years ago, in the late Early Pleistocene. Those early deer carried five-tined antlers that ended in a fork. Later, in the Middle Pleistocene, the European line began to grow a crown of tines at the antler tip. Several island forms lived in Pleistocene Italy and Sicily, and one of them shrank to about 100 kilograms.

During the last ice age, about 20,000 years ago, European red deer survived in refuges in Spain, southern France and the Balkans. As the ice went, they spread north again from those refuges. The deer of Corsica, Sardinia and North Africa carry a third, older lineage. The closest living relatives are the elk, the sika deer and the sambar. In Scotland and New Zealand the red deer has hybridised with introduced sika and elk.

Appearance

The red deer is a big, long-legged deer with a long head and large ears. A stag measures 175 to 250 centimetres from nose to tail base, and a hind measures 160 to 210 cm. The tail adds 12 to 19 cm, and the shoulder stands 95 to 130 cm high. Stags weigh 160 to 240 kilograms, and hinds weigh 120 to 170 kg. The largest stags, in the Carpathian Mountains, can reach 500 kg. At the other extreme, the Corsican red deer weighs only 80 to 100 kg.

The summer coat is reddish brown, sometimes with a few pale spots on the back. In autumn the deer grows a thicker, greyish brown winter coat. A pale rump patch, orange above and whitish below, is edged with dark brown. Many stags grow a short neck mane in autumn, and British and Norwegian stags carry the thickest ones. Calves are born with white spots, which fade by the end of their first summer.

Only the stag grows antlers, which are bone and sprout in spring. A typical pair is about 71 cm long and weighs about 1 kg, but big antlers reach 115 cm and 5 kg. While growing, the antler is wrapped in a soft skin called velvet, which carries blood to the bone. Growth can reach 2.5 cm a day. A European stag's antler is fairly straight, and the top tines of a large male form a cup or crown.

Habitat and range

The natural range covers most of continental Europe, from southern Norway and Sweden south to Spain and east to Ukraine. It continues through Anatolia and the Caucasus into northern Iran. In North Africa, the Barbary stag survives in the Atlas Mountains of Algeria and Tunisia. Red deer lived in the Levant until the 16th century but are now extinct there. Britain has native herds in Scotland, the Lake District and Exmoor, and Ireland has its own subspecies.

The species first evolved at the edge between woodland and grassland, and it still does best there. It prefers broadleaved forest broken up by large meadows. It also lives in Mediterranean scrub, on alpine meadows up to 2,800 metres, and on the treeless moors of Scotland. In the deserts of Central Asia it keeps to thickets along rivers. In the mountains, herds spend winter in low wooded valleys and climb to high pastures in summer.

People have carried the red deer around the world. New Zealand received its first pair in 1851, and more than 800 deer followed in 220 separate releases. Australia's herds began with six deer sent from Windsor Great Park in 1860. Deer also run wild in Argentina, Chile, Peru, Uruguay, the United States and Canada. GBIF holds records from 84 countries, though that count includes farms and zoos.

Diet and feeding

The red deer is a ruminant with a four-chambered stomach. It swallows food quickly, then brings it back up and chews it again while resting. It is an intermediate feeder, taking roughly 30% grass and sedge and 65% browse. Browse means the leaves, shoots and bark of trees and shrubs, and on Scottish moors it likely includes heather. Fruits and seeds matter in autumn, and one count found up to 300 plant species in the diet.

A stag eats about 14 to 16 kilograms of fresh plant matter a day, and a hind eats 9 to 10 kg. Hinds pick better quality food than stags. A hind feeding a calf needs more than twice her usual energy. Appetite follows the seasons, peaking from March to June and falling in late autumn. Feeding takes 7 to 12 hours of each day, split into six to eight bouts.

Behaviour and social life

For most of the year, stags and hinds live apart. The core social unit is a family of hinds: an old hind, her daughters and granddaughters, and their calves. Stags form small, loose bachelor bands once they have shed their antlers. In open country several hind groups may merge, and winter gatherings can be large. After the rut, hinds form herds of up to 50 animals.

Home ranges vary from 2 to 5 square kilometres in rich habitat to 40 km2 or more in poor country. Mountain herds may move 10 to 60 km between winter and summer ground. The deer is most active at dawn and dusk, and it lies up to chew the cud through the middle of the day. Where people disturb it, it feeds more at night. One or more herd members keep watch while the rest feed and rest.

The rut runs from late September into October, and in some places from August into early winter. A mature stag leaves his summer range for a traditional rutting stand and gathers a harem of hinds. He may hold as many as 20 hinds and drive off rival males. Rivals size each other up by roaring and by walking side by side, and a fight follows if neither backs down. A harem stag hardly eats, and he can lose up to 20% of his body weight during the rut. Breeding success peaks at about eight years old, and stags over 11 rarely hold a harem.

Communication and senses

The stag's roar is the best known sound of the species. It is a deep bellow suited to forest, unlike the high bugle of the elk in open country. Hinds are drawn to the stags that roar most often and most loudly. Roaring peaks at dawn and in the evening. Hinds bark and grunt, and a calf bleats to its mother.

Hinds and calves keep in touch by calling, and a large nursery hums with sound through the day. Smell matters too: rutting stags urinate on themselves, and scent glands sit in front of the eyes and on the legs. Like other deer, the red deer has keen hearing and a strong sense of smell, which serve it well in cover. Posture carries a message as well, from the parallel walk of rival stags to a hind's guttural grunt at a predator.

Reproduction and life cycle

Hinds come into season in autumn, and each cycle lasts about 18 days. A hind accepts a stag for only 6 to 24 hours in each cycle. Mating is well timed, and about 80% of hinds conceive within three to four weeks of each other. A stag usually needs a dozen or more attempts before the first successful mating. Some stags father a dozen calves in a season, and others father none.

Pregnancy lasts 240 to 262 days, the same in every subspecies. Most calves are born in May and June, after the hind has left her group to find cover. She almost always has a single calf, and twins are very rare. A calf weighs about 15 kilograms at birth in good habitat, and as little as 8 to 9 kg on poor ground. It lies hidden in tall plants for the first week or so, then follows its mother.

The calf joins the herd after about two weeks and is weaned at about two months. It stays with its mother for almost a year, until the next calf arrives. Hinds can breed at 16 months in good habitat, and most first calve at two years. Stags mature at a similar age but seldom breed before about five, when they can compete. Wild red deer live 10 to 13 years, and the oldest captive animal reached 31.5.

Predators and threats

Apart from people and their dogs, the gray wolf is the most serious predator of European red deer. Brown bears take deer now and then, and lynx take calves where the two overlap. Healthy adults are rarely killed, because the herd keeps watch and the deer is big and fast. Both sexes kick hard with the front legs, and a stag also uses his antlers. The largest hinds will stand and face an attacker to protect the calves.

Hunting is the main cause of death in most populations, and it is legal and managed across Europe. Habitat loss and heavy hunting cut the range sharply in the 18th and 19th centuries. In Scotland, breeding with introduced sika deer threatens the purity of native herds. Several Asian and African subspecies are Endangered or Vulnerable, and the Bactrian deer is on CITES Appendix I.

Population and conservation

The IUCN lists the red deer as Least Concern, and the species as a whole is increasing. In Europe outside Russia there were about 2 to 4 million red deer in 2005. Hunters took about 500,000 a year at that time, up from 270,000 in 1985. France went from 30,000 deer in 1970 to about 160,000 in 2014. Italy had only 3,000 in 1970 and about 57,000 by 2005.

The picture is worse at the edges of the range. The Barbary stag of North Africa is still declining, and the species is extinct in Albania and the Near East. The Corsican red deer died out on Corsica and was brought back from Sardinia in 1985. In Korea the deer was common in the early 1900s and rare by the 1960s. Hunting seasons, culling rules and reintroductions drove the European recovery from the 1950s onward.

Relationship with humans

People have hunted red deer since the Stone Age, and the meat, venison, is still eaten widely. Venison has more protein and less fat than beef or chicken. In Britain the meat was once limited to the gentry and to poachers, but supermarkets now sell it. Scottish estates sell deer stalking on open hill, and other estates run as venison farms. Farms in New Zealand, China and Siberia harvest 10 to 15 kilograms of antler velvet a year from each stag for East Asian medicine.

Antlers become furniture, chandeliers, coat hooks and decoration, a fashion that spread through Europe in the 19th century. Deer hair is tied into fishing flies. Farmers count the deer a pest, because it strips crops and young trees, and it can pass bovine tuberculosis to cattle. In New Zealand it is an official noxious pest, and over a million were shot in government operations between 1931 and 1975. In Argentina and Chile it competes with the native huemul, and the IUCN counts it among the 100 worst invasive species.

In culture and myth

Red deer appear in European cave paintings from as early as 40,000 years ago. At Star Carr in Yorkshire, people made head-dresses from red deer skulls about 11,000 years ago, perhaps for ritual or for hunting. Pictish stones in Scotland, carved between 550 and 850 AD, often show the deer as prey. In medieval England the mature stag, the hart, was the most prized quarry of all.

In the Scottish Highlands, the deer were known as fairy cattle, which the fairies milked on the high tops. In Irish legend the hind Sadhbh became the wife of Fionn mac Cumhaill and the mother of the poet Oisin. In Norse myth four stags browse on the world tree Yggdrasil. In Christian legend Saint Hubert saw a cross between the antlers of a stag and gave up hunting. Landseer's painting The Monarch of the Glen, from 1851, made the Scottish stag a symbol of the Highlands.