The Deer Rut: The Spectacular Sound of Autumn

The Roar of the Forest King and the Mountain

The end of September is approaching relentlessly. The lush landscape inevitably begins to be tinted with beautiful and ephemeral colors of the burning autumn fire, and the fast sunset is majestically accompanied by a deeply hoarse and visceral sound. It is a deep and territorial lament that instantly breaks the overwhelmingly cold silence of the mountain and resonates like a deep echo throughout the entire wild ecosystem. It is the magical, awaited, and unmistakable time of the Rut (La Berrea), the instinctive and intense mating season of the imposing and majestic great red deer.

In the steep and cold high valleys of the iconic Picos de Europa and in various lush and secluded settings of the wonderful framework of Redes Park, the mighty adult males, who until then had spent their long and hot summers grazing in peace, camaraderie, and quiet summer solitude, are suddenly transformed, possessed by an overwhelming hormonal mandate for the pure survival of their majestic species.

What Exactly Does the Phenomenon of the Rut Involve, Step by Step?

It is a completely spectacular and unmatched physical and auditory demonstration of pure superiority, enormous brute force, superior genetics, and undisputed hierarchy in situ. The robust, truly dominant, and massive males in the physical prime of their lives desperately seek to group, court, and firmly tie to their side the greatest possible number of females.

Emitting intense, breathtaking, and endlessly long bellows, completely at the top of their lungs regardless of physical exhaustion or the freezing environment, they launch a clear, haughty, and proudly defiant unfiltered guttural warning to clearly tell the rest of the vigorous young males: “This valuable and fertile harem of females belongs to me by unquestionable right, be extremely careful if you have the immense audacity to challenge me face to face”.

When a bold and inexperienced challenger (or preferably an equally mature male eager to fight passionately for total primacy and invaluable genetic favors) comes dangerously close enough to ignore the vocal warning and resolutely invoke a direct, brutal, and physical challenge… then, and only then, the dreaded open-field fight inevitably occurs. The directly thunderous clash of the enormous, heavy, extremely hard, and very long antlers charging with all their massive body weight and enormous inertia is of a natural fierceness and pure spectacularity, which is lamentably only rivaled by how astonishingly fleeting, explosive, and extremely fast the vast majority of these incredible and impressive direct hand-to-hand combats of pure animal supremacy statistically turn out to be.

Where and Exactly How to Respectfully Witness the Immemorial Magic of the Rut in Green Asturias

The capricious, wild, and extremely steep topography of the ancient Asturian mountains advantageously allows and confidently offers countless and very abundant numerous highly elevated physical points. From these perfect, coveted, beautiful, and extremely calm natural rocky viewpoints or balconies, one can easily enjoy (and of course, hear clearly, sharply, and incredibly far away) these superb and priceless spectacles. You can achieve this while doing so at a very great, very good, and above all, extremely prudent and distant range, without disturbing the absolute peace of the herd in any way.

Special and statistically, this visual event usually occurs at dawn, with the mists, or in the growing cold of the late afternoon and the subsequent golden and melancholic sunset of the season.

One of the authentic and increasingly acclaimed main regional and national enclaves for the aforementioned wildlife sighting is without a doubt the rugged beauty of the Redes Natural Park. This park is found and stands sovereignly at the pinnacle nationwide as it is internationally very famous and incredibly popular for managing to unhesitatingly house an exceptionally and very dramatically high total censused number of impressive heads of stout adult deer.

Quick, Accurate, Effective, and Very Practical First-Hand Expert Tips:

1. Always bring and equip Professional Terrestrial Spotting Scopes and Binoculars of exceptionally very good, high, and excellent maximum sighting capacity, final luminosity, and long in situ observation, invaluably accompanying or effortlessly complementing this with an enviably very good, superb, and more than remarkable photographic equipment.
2. Inevitably always hire the pertinent guided tours, strictly regulated, 100% official, and ethically committed with the due and exhaustive precise permits of the competent government; travel and comfortably manage to go peacefully and safely without major, disastrous, and very unpleasant unnecessary frights directly to the aforementioned completely legal and expressly authorized mountain points accompanied by genuine expert local personnel.
3. Dress warmly. Autumn on the heights of beautiful Asturias is incredibly treacherous and unforgiving.