What Is a Male Deer Called? Stag, Buck, Bull and Hart

Names for male, female and young deer

The table below shows the standard names used by naturalists and wildlife agencies in Britain and North America.

The pattern is simple: the names come in sets. If the male is a stag, the female is a hind. If the male is a buck, the female is a doe. If the male is a bull, the female is a cow and the young is a calf.

Why do deer have different names?

The words come from different traditions. In medieval Britain, red deer were the most prized animals of the royal hunt, and they had their own vocabulary: the stag or hart, the hind and the calf. Smaller deer such as fallow and roe were described with buck and doe, words also used for goats, rabbits and hares.

When English speakers reached North America, they used buck and doe for the white-tailed and mule deer they hunted most. For the huge elk and moose, they borrowed the cattle words bull, cow and calf, which fit their size. The same words were later used for reindeer and caribou, which are herded like cattle in parts of Scandinavia and Russia.

So the name of a male deer tells you roughly how big the species is: bulls are the giants, stags are large, and bucks are small to medium. The rule is not perfect, but it works well for the common species. For the young, see what is a baby deer called?

Stag and hind: names for red deer

For the red deer, Europe’s best-known large deer, the male is a stag and the female a hind. British deer stalkers and naturalists also use extra words for stags of different ages and antlers:

• Knobber: a young stag growing his first small, unbranched antlers.
• Royal: a stag with 12 antler points. Imperial (14 points) and monarch (16 points) are rarer terms.
• Switch: a stag with long antlers but almost no side points.
• Hummel: a stag that never grows antlers at all.

Older hunting books add more names for each year of a stag’s life, but these are no longer in everyday use.

What is a hart?

Hart is an old word for a mature male red deer, traditionally a stag over five years old. It comes from Old English heorot, related to the Dutch hert and German Hirsch. Hind is just as old.

The pair survives in Bible translations, in poetry and in many place names. Hertford in England means roughly “ford of the harts”. The White Hart is one of the most common pub names in England, because a white hart was the personal badge of King Richard II in the 14th century.

Buck and doe: roe, fallow and white-tailed deer

The roe deer, Europe’s most widespread deer, has bucks and does. In Britain, roe young are traditionally called kids rather than fawns. Fallow deer have bucks, does and fawns, and a young fallow buck in his second year is called a pricket because his first antlers are simple spikes.

In North America the white-tailed deer is the most familiar deer. Males are bucks, females are does and the spotted young are fawns. A young male with spike antlers is often called a spike or spike buck, while a buck carrying big antlers is often described by counting the points.

Bull and cow: elk, moose and reindeer

The three biggest members of the deer family use cattle words. A bull moose can weigh over 600 kg (1,300 lb), and a bull elk often over 300 kg (660 lb), so bull and cow suit them well. Reindeer and caribou also use bull and cow, and in reindeer both sexes grow antlers. That makes reindeer cows unusual, as explained in do female reindeer have antlers?

Do only male deer have antlers?

In almost all deer species, only males grow antlers, so antlers are the quickest way to tell a stag or buck from a female. Reindeer are the main exception, as both sexes grow them. The Chinese water deer has no antlers at all; instead, males have long, tusk-like upper canine teeth.

Antlers are shed and regrown every year, so for a few weeks in late winter or spring, males of most species have no antlers and can look much like females.