46 Fun Facts About Deer

Unlike deer antlers, which are bone, the horns of cattle and sheep are sheathed in what?

Keratin, the stuff of human fingernails, sheathes a living bone core, so a horn keeps growing for life; an antler is dead bone by the time it is fully grown and is shed each year.

What are wild reindeer called in North America?

Caribou is the North American name for wild Rangifer tarandus, while 'reindeer' is kept for domesticated herds, such as those shipped from Siberia to Alaska in the 1890s.

Many deer are most active at dawn and dusk, a habit biologists describe with which word?

Crepuscular means active at twilight: deer feed around dawn and dusk, then spend long spells resting in cover to chew the cud between bouts.

The world's smallest deer, barely knee-high to a person, is which South American animal?

The pudu is so small that it stands on its back legs, climbs fallen logs or presses saplings down with its front legs to reach the leaves it eats.

Which continent has just one native deer, a subspecies of red deer?

Africa's only native deer is the Barbary stag, a red deer of the Atlas Mountains' forests; the antelope found across the rest of the continent are horned relatives of cattle, not deer.

Instead of antlers, what does the male water deer of Korea and China grow?

Long tusk-like canine teeth serve male water deer as weapons in fights between rivals, much as antlers do in other species, and have earned them the nickname 'vampire deer'.

How many chambers does a deer's stomach have?

Like cattle, deer are ruminants with a four-chambered stomach (rumen, reticulum, omasum, abomasum), though theirs is small for the group, so they browse low-fibre, nutrient-rich plants rather than coarse grass.

In Old English, the word 'deer' (dēor) originally meant what?

A wild animal of any kind was a dēor in Old English: medieval writers could call a fish, an ant or a fox a 'der', and German 'Tier' still simply means animal.

Which deer, a favourite of European park herds, takes its name from an Old English word for a pale brownish yellow?

Fallow deer are named from Old English fealu, a pale brownish yellow, after their coat; the Romans carried them across Europe, as far as enclosures in Britain.

How does a newborn white-tailed fawn mainly avoid predators?

Lying hidden and still works because a fawn has little scent in its first days; the doe keeps her distance and returns only a few times a day to nurse.

Which extinct Ice Age deer carried the largest antlers of any deer known, far wider than a moose's?

The Irish elk was neither exclusively Irish nor an elk: this giant deer ranged across Europe and northern Asia, and its antlers, the largest of any known deer, could span 3.6 metres or more.

What is the scientific name of the white-tailed deer?

Odocoileus virginianus is named for Virginia; the everyday name comes from the tail's white underside, which the deer flips up like a flag when alarmed.

What nearly wiped out America's white-tailed deer by the early 1900s?

Unregulated hunting had left very few deer across much of the country by 1900; hunting laws and conservation programmes then brought the herds back.

A white-tailed deer's coat is reddish in summer but what colour in winter?

The autumn moult replaces the reddish summer coat with a grey-brown winter coat of longer, hollow hairs that trap air for insulation.

The smallest subspecies of white-tailed deer in North America is confined to which US state?

Florida's Keys are the only home of the Key deer, a dwarf white-tail that had come close to extinction by the 1950s; a refuge created for it in 1957 helped it recover to several hundred animals.

White-tailed deer were introduced for hunting to which Nordic country in the 1930s?

Finland owes its white-tails to Finnish emigrants in Minnesota, who formed a committee to send a new game animal home; the handful of fawns shipped over in the mid-1930s founded today's herd.

The mule deer of western North America is named after a mule because of its large what?

Ears like a mule's give the mule deer its name; it is also known for stotting, bounding away with every hoof hitting the ground at once.

By State Farm's 2013 figures, drivers in which US state were likeliest to hit a deer?

West Virginia drivers faced a 1 in 41 chance, against 1 in 77 in fifth-placed Pennsylvania; the danger peaks in autumn, when the mating season sends deer dashing into traffic.

Chronic wasting disease was first identified in 1967 in mule deer in which state?

In Colorado, the wasting syndrome was first recognised in captive mule deer at a research facility in 1967; the prion disease has since reached wild herds in dozens of US states and, from 2016, Norway's reindeer.

The flap of furred skin that hangs from a moose's throat is called a dewlap or a what?

Bell is the usual name for this pendant of fur-covered skin, carried by bulls and many cows; its purpose is unknown, with guesses running from cooling to showing off fitness to mates.

Moose released in 1878 and 1904 multiplied into the dominant hoofed animal on which Canadian island?

Newfoundland had no moose until those releases; with plenty of food and few predators they multiplied so far that Parks Canada now manages their numbers to let over-browsed forest regrow.

A 2008 study of trophy antlers suggested that a moose's broad, palmate antlers may do what?

Amplify sound at its ear: tested with a microphone, the flat antler behaved like a parabolic reflector, which fits the finding that bulls with antlers hear better than those without.

The name 'wapiti', used for the North American elk, comes from a Shawnee word meaning what?

Wapiti means 'white rump' in Shawnee, after the pale patch around the elk's tail; 'elk' itself is a muddle, since in Europe the word means the moose.

During the rut, bull elk advertise themselves with a loud whistle-like call known as what?

Bugling begins as a deep, resonant note and climbs fast to a high-pitched squeal before ending in grunts; European red deer stags, by contrast, roar.

Which subspecies, native to the rainforests of the Pacific Northwest, is the largest of the North American elk?

Roosevelt elk bear Theodore Roosevelt's name, and as president he set aside Mount Olympus National Monument in 1909 largely to protect their herds; it is now Olympic National Park.

What is a female red deer called, the counterpart of a stag or hart?

A hind is the female red deer and a hart the stag; 'hart' now sounds archaic but survives on pub signs such as the White Hart, once the badge of Richard II.

Roe deer mate in midsummer yet give birth the following June because of what reproductive quirk?

Delayed implantation of the embryo: the fertilised egg lies dormant until about January, a pause found in no other hoofed mammal and thought to stop fawns arriving in midwinter.

When alarmed, a roe deer flashes its pale rear patch and makes a sound much like which animal?

A dog is what a startled roe deer sounds like, and both sexes bark; in the breeding season the calls change, with does piping to attract bucks, which answer with a rasping noise.

From which permanent bony stalks on the skull do a deer's antlers grow?

Antlers grow each year from pedicles, permanent bony stalks on the frontal bones; the antler is cast from the pedicle after the rut, and the next set grows from the same base.

Which Asian deer has the fewest chromosomes of any mammal?

The Indian muntjac has just six chromosomes in females and seven in males, yet its close cousin Reeves's muntjac carries 46, the same number as a human.

Britain's wild muntjac largely descend from deer the Duke of Bedford brought from China to which estate?

Woburn Abbey's deer park did lasting good too: the 11th Duke gathered the last Père David's deer from European zoos there, saving the species after it died out in China.

Père David's deer is known in Chinese as sibuxiang, a nickname meaning what?

Four not alike sums up an animal said to borrow from four others without matching any: in one common telling, a cow's hooves, a camel's neck, a stag's antlers and a donkey's tail.

The chital of India is also known in English by what name?

The chital, or axis deer, is called the spotted deer because, unlike most deer, it keeps its white spots for life; 'chital' comes from the Sanskrit citrala, meaning 'variegated'.

In Japanese Shinto belief, the sika deer is regarded as what?

A messenger to the gods: legend says the deity Takemikazuchi rode to Nara's Kasuga Shrine on a white deer, and the deer around it have been protected as sacred for over a thousand years.

A 2011 UCL study found reindeer can see light in which range, invisible to humans?

Ultraviolet vision makes urine and fur, which vanish against snow to human eyes, stand out in sharp contrast; reindeer eyes also shift from gold in summer to blue in the dark of winter.

Some North American reindeer herds make the longest migration of any land mammal each spring for what purpose?

To calve: each spring the cows trek to traditional grounds that the herd uses year after year, where most calves are born within days of one another.

Which indigenous people herd Sweden's reindeer?

The Sámi alone hold the right to herd reindeer in Sweden, working through 51 herding communities called samebyar; their quarter of a million or so animals range free across the north.

Which company created Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in 1939 as a promotional booklet?

Robert L. May wrote Rudolph for Montgomery Ward, which gave away some 2.4 million copies of the booklet to shoppers in 1939; May had considered naming the reindeer Rollo or Reginald.

How many reindeer pull Santa's sleigh in the 1823 poem 'A Visit from St. Nicholas'?

Eight reindeer: Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid and, in the 1823 printing, Dunder and Blixem (later Donner and Blitzen); the red-nosed ninth was a department-store creation of 1939.

In Felix Salten's 1923 novel, Bambi was which species of deer, before Disney made him a white-tail?

Roe deer, like Salten's Bambi, are native to Europe, so Disney's artists redrew him as a white-tail, the deer American audiences would know best.

In Greek myth, capturing which golden-antlered deer of Artemis was Heracles' third labour?

The Ceryneian hind was so swift that Heracles chased it for a whole year; in Apollodorus's telling he finally caught it alive and had to talk Artemis out of her anger.

Which Speyside single malt, first distilled on Christmas Day 1887, uses a stag's head as its emblem?

Glenfiddich's makers translate its name as 'valley of the deer', hence the stag emblem; William Grant built the distillery with his own children in 1886.

The word 'venison' comes from the Latin venari, meaning what?

To hunt is the root sense: venison first meant the flesh of any hunted game animal and only later narrowed to deer meat.

What is the scientific family name for true deer?

Cervidae takes its name from cervus, the Latin for deer; musk deer and mouse-deer, despite their names, belong to separate families of their own.

Which country has no native deer but six introduced species?

Australia's six wild deer species all arrived with European settlers; they are now managed as pests that eat, ringbark and trample native plants.

What name is given to the soft, furry skin that covers a deer's antlers while they grow?

Velvet is rich in blood vessels that feed the fastest-growing bone of any mammal; once the antler hardens, the velvet dies and is thrashed off against vegetation.