VIDEO: Red deer in morning light

Video recorded by Urmas Lett, www.eenet.ee
Translation Liis
 
Red deer     Punahirv        Cervus elaphus
 
The video starts with a rattle marking that the IR lamps switch off. Since the solstice the day is already quite a bit longer and the snow cover helps to light up.
 
The deer stags are unwilling to leave the feeding ground: there are no threats, the weather is calm and foreign noises would be audible from far off, so the gang goes on with its own doings. Some individuals with quite splendid antlers are visible, as well as young ones with stick antlers on the lower steps of the hierarchy. Occasionally relationships are settled with antlers but a real urge for it is lacking. One’s standing is marked in the herd which has a quite impressive size (in the video we don’t see the whole group of stags).
 
The height at withers of large stags is a little less than a metre and a half; the body length of the larger animals is clearly over two metres, weight around a quarter of a tonne and the powerful crown of antlers can weigh twenty kilos. The deer cows are much more seldom visible.
 
The menu in the forest in winter is tree bark and twigs, but in places snow is also scraped off bilberry shrubs for a change. They can reach up to pull off tree bark at up to 2 metres, twigs are snatched from half a metre higher. The silage ball in the front that was brought a week earlier seems to please the deer better; the younger animals are allowed to nibble at the silage ball to the left. The snow has not even been pushed off the hay ball – this much about taste preferences.
 
In a month the stags with larger antlers will begin dropping their “male pride” on the forest floor. The younger keep theirs until March.
 
 


 

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