DEER WEATHERVANE

The Fallow Deer weathervane featured here was commissioned by a customer who raises Fallow Deer on a large private game preserve in the South. He sent us photos of one of his prize bucks and it served as the model for this weathervane. We enjoyed working with this customer and he graciously sent us photos of the deer weathervane once it had been installed on a tall pole that was visible from his new cabin. This particular fallow deer sculpture piece is actually four feet in size! While our customer has exclusive rights to this particular design, I post it here to show other potentially interested parties how a fallow deer can be rendered. If you are interested in having a fallow deer rendered as a weathervane, we would be happy to work with you to develop a new design.

While this Fallow Deer weather vane was made without its distinctive spots, we can easily use gold leaf to mimic these markings. In fact, gilding the antlers also adds a distinctive touch to our deer weathervanes (see our Mule Deer weathervane webpage for an example of this).

The Fallow Deer (Dama dama) is a ruminant mammal belonging to the family Cervidae. The male is a buck, the female is a doe, and the young a fawn. The life span is around 12-16 years. All of the Fallow deer have white spots on their backs, and black tips at the ends of their tails. The species has great variations in color, with four main variants, "common", "menil", "melanistic" and "white”. The common form has a brown coat with white mottles that are most pronounced in summer with a much darker coat in the winter. The white is the lightest colored, almost white; common and menil are darker, and melanistic is very dark, even black (easily confused with the Sika Deer). Only bucks have antlers, these are broad and shovel-shaped. They are grazing animals; their preferred habitat is mixed woodland and open grassland. During the rut bucks will spread out and females move between them, at this time of year fallow deer are relatively ungrouped compared to the rest of the year when they try to stay together in groups of up to 150.