Deer seen duelling in middle of Polish town

A pair of male red deer have been caught on camera fighting one another on a busy street near the centre of the Polish town of Zakopane. An official from a nearby national park notes that such a sight is rare in natural environments, let alone urban ones.

On Saturday, video footage emerged of the two deer locking horns with one another on Jagiellońska Street in Zakopane, just outside the town’s water park. Cars are forced to stop as the pair fight in the middle of the road while pedestrians are seen staring in amazement.

“The sight of fighting deer in the middle of a busy street is quite a big surprise,” said Tomasz Skrzydłowski, a scientist working at Tatra National Park, which sits alongside Zakopane among the mountains on Poland’s southern border with Slovakia, quoted by broadcaster TVN.

“It is the rutting [mating] season now, which will soon be over,” he added. “During this time, the stags [male deer] try to scare off potential rivals, but it rarely happens that a fight takes place, even in natural conditions. The fact that they are fighting in the middle of a city on the street is a bizarre situation.”

Skrzydłowski notes that such duels are rare because they are exhausting and dangerous for the animals, sometimes even resulting in death. “The individuals that fought the duel on Jagiellońska Street are not very large, but with beautiful antlers,” continued the scientist.

“The bull that wins such a duel starts breeding with a whole herd of does [female deer] in a given area – this is how it is in nature, but the situation here is different, because in Zakopane there are does, but they are not large herds, such as in forest areas,” he added.

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TVN reports that in recent years does have been a fairly common sight in Zakopane and are now something of a tourist attraction. But stags are rarely seen there. Tatra National Park has appealed to people not to approach the wild animals.

In recent years, there have been growing reports of wild animals encroaching into urban spaces in Poland. In 2022, Zakopane installed bear-proof rubbish bins to discourage animals from foraging in them.

Last year, the city of Kraków asked residents to stop feeding wild boar, whose numbers have surged. Poland’s capital, Warsaw, also has a booming boar population.

Main image credit: tatryofficial/Facebook

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.