BREEDING
Rearing in a safe environment
The mating season, called rutting season in hunting terms, begins at the end of September and lasts five to six weeks.
A characteristic feature of the top dog is that it often drives back females that move away from the herd. The typical rutting roar of the breeding stag can be heard particularly often.
To make it quieter for the female animals during the rutting season, I have built a special gate into which only the animals can enter.
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In principle, however, the top dog does not assume a leadership role in the rutting pack. It only stays in the vicinity of a clear deer pack, which still follows its leader.
The gestation period of fertilised female red deer is about 230 days.
The so-called "weaning season", birth of the calf, is from mid-May to the end of June in the farm game reserve. As a rule, only one calf per animal is born. For the birth, the mother animals retreat, with the offspring being aggressively driven away by the previous year. The young animals can already stand a few hours after birth and also follow the mother slowly. They have a typical juvenile mottling, with white spots standing out from the otherwise reddish-brown coat. This spotting has a camouflaging effect, as calves lying quietly visually dissolve in relation to their surroundings.
One of the innate behaviours of the young calves is that they do not follow their mother after suckling, but remain motionless in a curled-up position on the ground. A few hours after birth, the calves retreat to the specially built calf hutch.
Only when the calf is a few days old and can follow the mother animal without any problems, does the mother animal rejoin the clear game herd with the calf.
