Stags’ Heads 95 
10th March, the eight-year-old a week or ten days later, and so on to the two-year-olds, who 
will frequently not cast till the beginning of June. In the case of wild stags the dates are 
approximately a month later. 
An observant forester in Perthshire tells me that when he wishes to obtain good 
dropped horns he watches the big stags in the evening when they are settling down for the 
night, as it is generally at this time of the twenty-four hours that they get rid of their 
appendages. If he sees them shaking their heads frequently, he goes to the spot in the 
morning, and is often rewarded with a pair or more of antlers, which are his perquisites. 
It is a curious thing that red deer do not cast both their horns at the same spot, as 
wapiti generally do. In 1886 I visited the stretch of “ divide on North Fork, Powder 
River, Wyoming, which was annually used by the wapiti as their shedding ground in spring 
before entering the great forests. Here lay some hundreds of pairs of antlers close together 
bleaching in the western sun, and they were nearly all 
pairs, and evidently cast together. 
In parks big stags frequently cast both their antlers 
at the same time, but more often the second horn 
remains fixed, or hangs by a corner for a day longer. 
Park stags are clean sometimes as early as 20th 
July, but as a rule they remain in the velvet till 1st 
August. Scotch stags rarely commence rubbing before 
12th August, and though I have seen a head nearly 
clean on 2nd August, they are seldom so before 1st 
September. 
Devonshire stags follow much the same rules as 
Scotch ones, and wild Irish deer are a little earlier. 
In the Field i or October 1896 appeared the following interesting note, on a subject too 
of which our knowledge is only partial at present, namely whether it is possible for a stag’s 
horn to bleed after it is once complete or not :— 
F// <bk*4faji. 
Deer Horns. _In a picture by Sir Edwin Landseer, which is probably well known to many of your 
readers, a stag is represented standing in the snow over a fallen rival, whose horn he has broken before 
giving him the fatal thrust. 1 The broken-off end of the horn is bleeding, and has dyed the snow red. As 
the artist has been criticised for (1) making one stag break another stag’s horn in two, and (2) for making 
the broken-off end of the horn bleed when the snow was deep upon the ground, an incident I witnessed 
may be of interest as showing that this picture is true to nature. On going up Quinag yesterday for a 
look round, the stalking being over, I happened to get my glass on to one of the liveliest fights I have 
ever seen. Two stags were at it hammer and tongs, and the battle was fairly even for a time, when one 
of them got much the best of it, though he would have certainly lost on a foul, as, as far as I could see, 
he jumped on his opponent several times when he was down. I watched the defeated one as he slunk off, 
and could only make out one horn on him, so I climbed up to the scene of the duel, and found this horn 
which I send for your inspection broken in two about the middle. The horn was bleeding when I picked 
it up, and drops of blood fell from it on to the snow two hours after. Whether the vanquished stag was 
sufficiently faithful in his imitation of the picture to die, I do not know ; he did not go very far before he 
1 “ The Fatal Duel . 1 
