Europe's classic stag is really a species complex
Red deer (Cervus elaphus) rank among the largest deer; males are stags or harts, females hinds. Fourth-largest living deer after moose, elk, and sambar, they ruminate with four-chambered stomachs. Genetics now treat traditional red deer as a species group, not one tidy species.
A typical stag measures 175 to 250 centimetres from nose to tail base and weighs 160 to 240 kilograms, while hinds reach 160 to 210 centimetres and usually 120 to 170 kilograms. Size swings widely: the small-antlered deer of the Carpathians can top 500 kilograms, whereas the Corsican form weighs only about 80 to 100. European animals carry longer tails than their Asian and North American cousins, and the species probably descends from central Asian ancestors.
Only males grow antlers, which sprout in spring, are cast at winter's end and are regrown from bone each year. An average rack is about 71 centimetres long and a kilogram in weight, though big ones reach 115 centimetres and five kilograms. Growth is driven by testosterone; as levels dip in autumn the velvet peels off and the antlers harden ahead of the rut. European stags have fairly straight, knobbly antlers whose upper tines form a cup or crown. Summer coats are reddish-brown, sometimes spotted, and thicker greyer coats grow for winter, when many stags also develop a neck mane, heaviest in Britain and Norway but absent in Caspian and Spanish deer.
The species ranges across Europe, the Caucasus, Anatolia, Iran's Hyrcanian Forest and North Africa, where the Barbary stag of the Atlas Mountains is the continent's only native deer; it survived in the Levant until the sixteenth century. It is Ireland's largest wild land mammal. France's herd grew from about 30,000 in 1970 to around 160,000 by 2014, and roughly 3,000 roam the Dutch Oostvaardersplassen reserve, although North African numbers keep falling.
People spread them widely. Lord Petre shipped a pair to New Zealand's South Island in 1851, but the hind was shot before breeding; some 220 later releases followed, and the animals are now culled from helicopters as pests. Prince Albert sent six from Windsor Great Park to Victoria in 1860, and feral red deer now damage Australian habitats and endanger drivers.
Source: Red deer
