Endangered
Persian fallow deer
Dama mesopotamica
Persian fallow deer is a mammal in the family Cervidae (order Artiodactyla) — Dama mesopotamica, recorded as Endangered.
Appearance
Other differences include the colour of the tail and having a wider upper end of the nasal bones than European fallow deer.
Range and habitat
The Persian fallow deer is a deer that once inhabited most of West Asia, but is currently only found in the wild in Iran and Israel. The species was re-introduced to Israel in 1978, thereafter reaching a stable wild population there, while it continues to occur naturally in Iran.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
The Persian fallow deer is a grazing herbivore, with grass comprising 60% of its diet along with leaves and nuts. Older male deer are more territorial than younger males. Even so, older females stay closer to the site within an average of 0.9 km (0.56 mi) where they were reintroduced, while younger females migrate an average of 2.3 km (1.4 mi) away from release site.
Pregnancy lasts around 230 days, with females continuing to breed until around 15 years of age. Owing to a focused program of captive breeding, the population of Persian fallow deer has rebounded from only a handful of deer in the 1960s to over a thousand deer in the 2010s.
In crisis
Since 2008, it has been classified as an endangered species on the IUCN Red List. There are smaller populations of Persian fallow deer in captivity at European zoos, particularly in Germany. It is thought that the main reason for the decline of Persian fallow deer has been human hunting, beginning since the early Neolithic era.
As the native wolf population of Israel has recovered and recolonised areas of the country from the Golan Heights, wolf predation of fallow deer has increased steadily since the late 2010s, something authorities have tried to curb somewhat. Although 1,100 individuals as of 2015 means that the taxon no longer qualifies as 'endangered', the IUCN argues that only wild and mature animals in Israel count (300), and subtracts 50 from this number because it claims they may not be viably mature, and thus is still able to claim less than 250 animals exist, that then makes the taxon eligible for criterion D of the IUCN conservation status standards for 'endangered'.
Persian fallow deer is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Persian fallow deer, Wikidata item Q756889. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
