Red Deer

Red deer are the elk's Old World counterpart — close enough that the two interbreed, and at a distance nearly identical — native across Europe and on into North Africa and the Middle East, and introduced to Argentina, Chile, Australia, and New Zealand. The coat is a dark russet-brown with a paler buff patch on the rump and a pale tail; stags stand up to about 4½ feet at the shoulder, hinds a little less, and only stags carry the big, branching antlers, which grow larger with each year. Stags and hinds keep to separate groups most of the year, until the stags gather harems in late summer and autumn and the rut fills the woods with throaty roars and groans. They graze and browse — grasses, heather, shrub and tree shoots, fruit in autumn — shifting between woodland and open moor with the season, and deer with woodland shelter and feed grow noticeably bigger than hill deer.