Red deer get their name from their reddish-brown summer coat. In winter their fur turns grey-brown to blend in with the bare trees. They live in family herds, with the females (called hinds) and their young in one group, and the older males roaming separately.
The antlers are the most famous thing about red deer. Only the stags grow them. They start growing in spring, getting bigger each week. By autumn they are huge - a big stag can have antlers nearly a metre wide. Then in late winter the antlers drop off, and the stag has bare patches on his head where new ones start growing again.
Antlers grow ridiculously fast - up to 2.5 centimetres in a single day. That makes them one of the fastest-growing things in the whole animal kingdom. While they are growing, they are covered in a soft, fuzzy skin called 'velvet', which the stag eventually rubs off against trees.
Red deer are excellent runners and jumpers. They can sprint at 70 km/h and leap over fences taller than a tall adult. In the German forests, you are most likely to see them at dawn or dusk, when they come out of the trees to graze in clearings.