Deer Trivia
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46 free Deer trivia questions with answers. Deer are the animals almost everyone has seen and almost nobody knows much about. This deer trivia quiz covers the whole family: how antlers grow and why they fall off, which species has tusks instead, the largest deer alive and the one that fits in a shoebox, why reindeer are the only deer whose females wear antlers, and how a moose can dive to a lake bottom for lunch. It also wanders into deer in culture: Bambi's species change between the book and the film, the department store that invented Rudolph, the sacred deer of Nara, the third labour of Heracles and the leaping deer on a tractor. There are questions on white-tailed deer for North American readers, red deer and roe deer for Europeans, and elk, chital, sika and muntjac for everyone else. The early questions suit kids and family quiz nights; the later ones will stretch hunters, hikers and biology students. Every answer was checked against a reference page, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 46 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Unlike deer antlers, which are bone, the horns of cattle and sheep are sheathed in what?
Keratin
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.
Q 02What are wild reindeer called in North America?
Caribou
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.
Q 03Many deer are most active at dawn and dusk, a habit biologists describe with which word?
Crepuscular
Crepuscular means active at twilight: deer feed around dawn and dusk, then spend long spells resting in cover to chew the cud between bouts.
Q 04The world's smallest deer, barely knee-high to a person, is which South American animal?
Pudu
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.
Q 05Which continent has just one native deer, a subspecies of red deer?
Africa
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.
Q 06Instead of antlers, what does the male water deer of Korea and China grow?
Long tusk-like canine teeth
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'.
Q 07How many chambers does a deer's stomach have?
Four
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.
Q 08In Old English, the word 'deer' (dēor) originally meant what?
A wild animal of any kind
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.
Q 09Which deer, a favourite of European park herds, takes its name from an Old English word for a pale brownish yellow?
Fallow deer
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.
Q 10How does a newborn white-tailed fawn mainly avoid predators?
Lying hidden and still
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.
Q 11Which extinct Ice Age deer carried the largest antlers of any deer known, far wider than a moose's?
Irish elk
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.
Q 12What is the scientific name of the white-tailed deer?
Odocoileus virginianus
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.
Q 13What nearly wiped out America's white-tailed deer by the early 1900s?
Unregulated hunting
Q 21Moose released in 1878 and 1904 multiplied into the dominant hoofed animal on which Canadian island?
Newfoundland
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.
Q 22A 2008 study of trophy antlers suggested that a moose's broad, palmate antlers may do what?
Amplify sound at its ear
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.
Q 23The name 'wapiti', used for the North American elk, comes from a Shawnee word meaning what?
Unregulated hunting had left very few deer across much of the country by 1900; hunting laws and conservation programmes then brought the herds back.
Q 14A white-tailed deer's coat is reddish in summer but what colour in winter?
Grey-brown
The autumn moult replaces the reddish summer coat with a grey-brown winter coat of longer, hollow hairs that trap air for insulation.
Q 15The smallest subspecies of white-tailed deer in North America is confined to which US state?
Florida
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.
Q 16White-tailed deer were introduced for hunting to which Nordic country in the 1930s?
Finland
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.
Q 17The mule deer of western North America is named after a mule because of its large what?
Ears
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.
Q 18By State Farm's 2013 figures, drivers in which US state were likeliest to hit a deer?
West Virginia
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.
Q 19Chronic wasting disease was first identified in 1967 in mule deer in which state?
Colorado
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.
Q 20The flap of furred skin that hangs from a moose's throat is called a dewlap or a what?
Bell
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.
White rump
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.
Q 24During the rut, bull elk advertise themselves with a loud whistle-like call known as what?
Bugling
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.
Q 25Which subspecies, native to the rainforests of the Pacific Northwest, is the largest of the North American elk?
Roosevelt 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.
Q 26What is a female red deer called, the counterpart of a stag or hart?
Hind
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.
Q 27Roe deer mate in midsummer yet give birth the following June because of what reproductive quirk?
Delayed implantation of the embryo
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.
Q 28When alarmed, a roe deer flashes its pale rear patch and makes a sound much like which animal?
A dog
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.
Q 29From which permanent bony stalks on the skull do a deer's antlers grow?
Pedicles
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.
Q 30Which Asian deer has the fewest chromosomes of any mammal?
Indian muntjac
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.