A red deer stag has recently been roaming Georgia forests at night looking for love, said state experts. Sadly, the animal might have to remain a hopeless romantic.
“He’s looking for love, but he’s the only one,” Georgia Department of Natural Resources Lt. Brian Adams told the Augusta Chronicle. “If he was home where there are more of them he would have already locked onto a doe that was in heat and that’s where he’d stay.”
Red deer are native to much of Europe, western Asia and parts of North Africa, according to the Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International.
State deer biologist Charlie Killmaster said he has only seen around a half dozen cases where an escaped exotic deer species has spent time in the Georgia countryside. He believes the deer may have escaped from a private deer farm near the Glascock-Warren county line.
The Augusta Chronicle said an individual in that area has been depopulating a herd in recent years. When that person removed fences from his property line in the summer, he thought he had removed all of the animals.
“He was pretty surprised and really didn’t think it was one of his,” Killmaster said. “He was pretty confident they had gotten every last one of them, but they’ll surprise you sometimes. Once we confirmed it was a red deer, that was the closest permitted location (the permit is still active) and that’s as close to a smoking gun as we’re going to get. He confirmed that he does not have any interest in getting the animal back.”
Adams started receiving images of the suspected large animal loose in Georgia about a month ago. First, it popped up near Mitchell, around two hours east of Atlanta in blurry, night-time photos.
At that time, the animal was thought to be an elk. However, once daylight photos started appearing, it became clear that this was a different beast.
“Red deer have a much more reddish-brown colored coat where elk have like a tan-colored buckskin,” Killmaster said. “Male red deer have dark-colored manes or neck fur. The antlers are usually the tell-tale [sign] because red deer have what they call crowns at the tips of their antlers, a cluster of points. Elk don’t have that.”
Adams said that the red deer stag seen in Georgia has very identifiable antlers.
“One side is a really good strong rack, and the other side is kind of weak with little points,” he explained.
Almost all of the photos of this particular stag have been captured at night and that all have been on remote game cameras. So far, nobody has claimed to see it in person.
Killmaster estimates from photos that the animal could weigh around 400 pounds. He also thinks all the images received could be of the same deer rather than multiple red deer loose in the state.
“It blows my mind that this thing has made it this many weeks into the firearms deer season and hasn’t gotten shot yet,” he said. “He’s highly nocturnal and that might have something to do with it.”
While red deer are in the same genus with elk and could interbreed with them, they can’t mate with the much smaller white-tailed deer found in Georgia. That’s why Adams and Killmaster think the stag has been seen on so many cameras – he hasn’t found a doe to settle down with.
Though the stag hasn’t been caught by a hunter yet, Mark Williams, DNR’s commissioner of natural resources, authorized the destruction of the stag in a memorandum dated Sept. 30. This letter was sent to area hunters.
“Because live capture is unlikely and no owner can be identified, this letter will serve as authorization for any legal hunter to destroy the animal,” Williams said.
“Whoever kills it, they can have it, but we need to be able to test it,” Adams said. “The reason those things have to be permitted is because they come from out west and the last thing we want is for them to bring in some kind of disease that would wipe our deer population out. The main thing we worry about is Chronic Wasting Disease.”
This is a “a progressive, fatal disease that affects the brain, spinal cord, and many other tissues of farmed and free-ranging deer, elk, and moose,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Other diseases farmed deer can spread include bovine tuberculosis, said Killmaster.
“I don’t worry as much about chronic wasting with this deer because it is likely the offspring of an animal brought into this area many generations ago,” Killmaster said. “If there was anything that led me to believe that it may have been illegally imported then that would be a legitimate concern. Regardless, when the animal is killed, we need to test it.”
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