Red Deer (Cervus elaphus): Facts, Stags, Rut and Habitat

Appearance

In summer a red deer’s coat is a rich reddish brown, which gives the species its name. In autumn it molts into a thicker, longer gray-brown winter coat that insulates the animal through cold months. Both sexes have a pale cream or buff patch on the rump around a fairly short tail. Some adults keep a few faint pale spots on the back in summer, a leftover from the spotted coat of the calf.

Stags are much larger and heavier than hinds. In autumn many stags grow a shaggy mane on the neck, and the thick neck muscles needed for fighting make them look even bigger. Stags in Britain and Norway tend to have the most obvious manes.

Only stags grow antlers. They are made of bone and grow each spring and summer under a soft, hairy skin called velvet, which carries blood to the growing bone. Antlers can grow by about 2.5 cm (1 in) a day at their fastest. By late summer the velvet dies and the stag rubs it off against trees and heather. A typical set is about 70 cm (28 in) long, while exceptional sets reach over 1 m (3.3 ft). In larger stags the top points form a cup or “crown” shape. Stags cast their antlers in late winter or early spring and start growing a new pair almost at once.

How big is a red deer?

Red deer vary a lot in size from place to place. The heaviest live in central and eastern Europe, where food is rich, while deer on the open hills of the Scottish Highlands are much smaller. For the full picture, see how big is a red deer?

Based on average weight, the red deer is usually ranked as the fourth-largest deer, after the moose, the elk and the sambar of southern Asia. The smallest form is the Corsican red deer of Corsica and Sardinia, at roughly 80–100 kg (175–220 lb) for a stag.

Habitat and range

Red deer were originally animals of open woodland and forest edges, where trees give shelter and clearings provide grass. Today they also live in mountains, open hills and moorland. In Scotland, most red deer spend their lives on treeless heather hills, an open habitat they adapted to after the old forests were cleared.

The native range covers most of Europe, from Ireland, Britain, Spain and Portugal east to the Baltic region and the Balkans, plus the Caucasus, Anatolia and the Caspian forests of northern Iran. In northwest Africa, the Barbary stag of the Atlas Mountains region of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia is the only deer native to Africa.

In Britain, native red deer survive in the Scottish Highlands and islands, the Lake District and southwest England, especially Exmoor. Herds in many other parts of England descend from park escapes and releases. Ireland’s oldest native herd lives around Killarney National Park.

People introduced red deer to New Zealand, Australia, Argentina and Chile in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In these places they can damage native forests, and in South America they compete with the endangered huemul deer. The red deer appears on the IUCN Invasive Species Specialist Group’s list of 100 of the world’s worst invasive alien species.

Many European red deer move with the seasons, grazing higher slopes in summer and dropping to lower, more sheltered ground in winter.

Diet and feeding

Red deer are herbivores and ruminants. Like cattle, they have a four-chambered stomach and bring food back up to chew again as cud, which lets them digest tough plant material. They feed mainly at dawn and dusk, chewing the cud during quieter hours.

Grasses and sedges make up much of the diet, especially in summer. Red deer also browse on leaves, shoots and buds of trees and shrubs, eat herbs, ferns, mosses and lichens, and nibble bark when food is scarce in winter. On Scottish hills, heather and moorland grasses are staple foods. Deer on the Isle of Rum and other coasts are known to feed on seaweed along the shore.

Stags and hinds often chew cast antlers and bones, a habit thought to supply minerals such as calcium and phosphorus.

Behavior and social life

For most of the year, red deer live in groups of one sex. Hinds stay in family groups made up of related females and their young, and daughters often settle close to where their mothers live. Stags form looser bachelor groups. Herds keep watch together, and a sharp bark from one deer sends the group running.

Red deer communicate with a range of sounds. Calves bleat, hinds bark when alarmed, and stags roar during the rut. They also use scent: stags wallow in peaty mud and spray urine on themselves in autumn, and both sexes have scent glands on the face and legs.

The animals are most active around dawn and dusk, though they may feed at any time of day where they are not disturbed.

The rut and reproduction

The red deer rut, or mating season, runs mainly from late September to November, with a peak in early to mid October in Britain. Mature stags gather groups of hinds called harems, sometimes 20 or more, and defend them against rivals. Stags roar to announce their strength, and research on Rum showed that rivals judge each other partly by how often and how deeply the other stag roars. Read more in when is the red deer rut?

When two stags are evenly matched, they often perform a parallel walk, striding side by side to size each other up. If neither backs down, they turn and lock antlers in a shoving fight. Most contests end without serious harm, but injuries do happen. Harem-holding stags hardly eat during the rut and can lose a large part of their body weight, up to about a fifth by some estimates.

After a pregnancy of about eight months, hinds give birth to a single calf, mostly from late May to July. Twins are rare. Calves are born with a spotted coat and spend their first days lying hidden in vegetation while the mother feeds nearby, returning to nurse. They join the herd after a week or two and suckle for several months, often into their first winter.

Hinds usually first breed at two to four years old, later on poor Highland ground. Stags can breed young, but in practice most do not hold a harem until they are about five to six years old. On Rum, stag breeding success peaked at around eight years old.

Lifespan, predators and threats

Wild red deer often live 10–13 years, and some reach 15–20 years. Hinds usually live longer than stags, partly because the rut takes a heavy toll on males. In captivity red deer can live over 20 years. Winter weather and food supply strongly affect survival, especially for calves in their first winter.

Gray wolves are the main natural predator of red deer in mainland Europe, and brown bears and Eurasian lynx also take some, mostly calves and weak animals. Red foxes and golden eagles occasionally kill young calves. In Britain and Ireland, where wolves and lynx were wiped out centuries ago, adult red deer have no natural predators except people.

Without predators, numbers in some places have grown so large that grazing and browsing stop native woodland from regenerating, particularly in the Scottish Highlands. Deer numbers are therefore managed by culling in many countries. Other pressures include road collisions, fencing and hybridization with introduced sika deer, which has blurred the genetic identity of red deer in parts of Scotland and Ireland.

Conservation status

The IUCN Red List classifies the red deer as Least Concern. The species is widespread and has increased in many countries. In France, for example, numbers rose roughly five-fold between 1970 and the 2010s, and in England red deer have spread through the Midlands and East Anglia since 2000.

Some local forms are in a weaker position. The Barbary stag of North Africa survives in small numbers, and Corsican red deer died out on Corsica before being reintroduced from Sardinia.

Red deer and elk

Red deer and North American elk were long treated as one species, because they look alike and can produce fertile hybrids. Genetic studies since the late 1990s show that they belong to separate lineages, and most authorities now call the elk Cervus canadensis. The elk is larger, with a paler rump patch, and bulls bugle with a high whistle rather than roar. See are elk and red deer the same species? for the full story.

Myths and facts

Myth: you can tell a stag’s age by counting antler points. Points do tend to increase in a stag’s early years, but the number depends on food, health and genes as much as age. Old stags often grow smaller, simpler antlers again. A stag with 12 points is traditionally called a royal, but that says nothing exact about its age.

Myth: deer drop antlers because they are injured or sick. Casting antlers is a normal yearly event driven by falling testosterone after the rut, and new antlers start growing straight away.

Relationship with people

Red deer have mattered to people for tens of thousands of years. They appear in Ice Age cave art across Europe, were a major source of meat, hide and antler tools, and became the most prestigious quarry of medieval royal forests. The stag is a symbol of the Scottish Highlands, made famous by paintings such as Edwin Landseer’s The Monarch of the Glen (1851).

Today red deer support tourism, and thousands of people travel each autumn to watch and hear the rut in places like the Highlands, Exmoor, Richmond Park in London and national parks across Europe. Visitors are asked to keep a good distance, because rutting stags and hinds with young calves can be unpredictable.