Meet the Zoo: Roxanne the Deer

Have you ever seen a deer with a Mohawk?

Here at the Prospect Park Zoo we have three of them.

Named for the little tuft of black hair on top of their heads, our Western tufted deer are these beautiful, soft grey deer from Southern China.

There’s Gage, the dad, Lucy, the mom and Roxanne, the 4-month-old baby.

Now that the snow is almost all melted, Roxanne and her parents are spending more time outside of their warm barn exploring. This will be Roxanne’s first spring and she is definitely interested in the new sights and smells as plants and flowers are starting to poke up from the ground. In the late afternoon,when these deer are most active, you can see Roxanne bouncing around after her mom or dad.

Tufted deer have special teeth that allow them to tear and eat plants. Gage, like all males, has a pairof downward growing tusks which he might use to fight other males in the wild. At the zoo, he has  no need to fight. If Gage and Lucy sense danger or become worried, they make a kind of grunting bark.Sometimes when they make that noise, they are protecting little Roxanne.

In China these deer are becoming threatened due to habitat loss from logging, hunting, farming, andother human activities. The Wildlife Conservation Society, which runs the Prospect Park Zoo, has scientists working to save the tufted deer’s habitat in China. One way to do this is to make special areas,called reserves, that allow animals to live undisturbed by humans. WCS has a lot of experience doing this all over the world.