Corzo, Hembra Catalonia

Roe deer are pronounced cultural followers and occupy a wide range of habitats, from closed mixed forests to structurally rich forest-and-field margins and open farmland with small copses, the Feldgehölze. They particularly favour the edge zones of richly structured bush and mixed woodland with dense undergrowth, which offer cover, rest, and feeding in close proximity. Thickets of regrowth from around 0.8 m in height serve as preferred daytime resting places, while at dawn and dusk the animals move out onto adjacent open ground to feed.

Socially, roe deer live for most of the year as solitary animals or in small family units of a doe with her fawns. In winter they often join loose associations, called Sprünge, which break up again before the setting season in spring. The rut, known in the German hunting language as Blattzeit, falls in high summer and runs roughly from mid July to mid August. A striking feature is embryonic diapause: after fertilisation, development pauses for several months, so that the fawns, the Kitze, are not born until May or June, usually two of them, more rarely one or three.

In the hunting language the male is called Bock or Rehbock, the female Ricke or Geiß, the young of the year a Kitz, and an animal in its second year a Schmalreh, or Jährling on the male side. A doe that has already given birth is referred to as Altricke. These age classes form the foundation of correctly identifying an animal in the field, the Ansprechen, and they govern which animal may be taken in which open season.

In classical practice, roe deer are pursued as individual hunting. The Ansitz, the high seat hunt on Kanzeln and Leitern positioned along game trails, on feeding meadows, and at forest edges, is at the centre, together with the Pirsch, the stalk, traditionally regarded as the crown of hunting in German tradition. Both methods cause very little disturbance when carried out properly and allow careful identification of the quarry. Alongside these, the Drückjagd, often as Ansitzdrückjagd in larger reviere, has become an important social hunt that concentrates pressure into a short window and produces a meaningful share of the annual harvest.

For forestry, roe deer carry particular weight. Because they are so widespread and feed selectively on the buds and shoots of young trees, they cause the largest share of browsing damage on forest regeneration. Repeated browsing on sensitive mixed species such as silver fir, sycamore, beech, oak, and ash can lead to a loss of species mixture and, in the worst case, to the local failure of entire tree species, which seriously hampers the conversion to climate-adapted, near-natural forests. A population matched to the carrying capacity of the habitat, one that allows the main tree species to regenerate as a rule without fencing, is therefore the guiding image of modern, ethical roe deer management in the DACH region.