How to Paint a Flehmen Deer

Male deer use the "flehmen" behavior to gauge the breeding status of does.

A buck deer tossing his head into chilled autumn air and curling his upper lip is a classic illustration of the rut across North America. This is the so-called "flehmen response," a behavior the males employ to interpret scents given off by potentially receptive does. The wildlife painter depicting such a scene does more than show an important aspect of deer behavior: He or she will evoke an entire fall season, as surely as deciduous trees turning golden or red, or a flock of southbound waterfowl.

Instructions

1. Understand what flehmen behavior is, first of all. It describes a process by which deer and other mammals deeply analyze a scent. With deer and other ungulates, males use the flehmen response to gauge a female's receptivity to mating: They smell a doe's rear or her urine, then raise their head and draw their upper lip, essentially pressing the odor into their Jacobson's organ, which helps them identify scents.

2. Sketch out a typical flehmen scene. For deer, the behavior is normally seen during the autumn rut, when bucks are frequently testing does for their estrus status. A standard composition might be a doe or two on the periphery with a thick-bodied, rutting buck rearing his head and grimacing.

3. Frame the deer with a late-autumn landscape. For an eastern white-tailed deer, this could be a frost-edged field of muted browns and yellows, or a deep, barren wood of black branches and colored leaf litter. For a western mule deer, it might be a high grassland with distant mountains painted with golden aspens or western larches.

4. 

   Winter coats of North American deer are usually paler and stonewashed compared to the red-browns of summer.

   Mix the desired colors. By the breeding season, white-tailed and mule deer have typically grown their heavier, paler winter coats, no longer exhibiting a deep, bronzed summer coloration. Usually the winter hairs grade from dark gray at the base to brownish gray at the tips. Often an open-country mule deer will be paler than a deep-woods blacktail or whitetail buck. The deer will usually show white at the throat and around the black muzzle, as well as shading the eyes and along its stomach and inner legs.

5. Use tight brushstrokes cast in the direction of the deer's hair to suggest the coarse, relatively short coat. The antlers will be shorn of velvet and hard; choose a dull yellow or light, grayish brown hue to color them.

6. Add a sparse cloud of wispy gray around the muzzle of the open-mouthed buck. This evocation of visible breath vapor will further suggest the crisp weather of an autumn morning or evening.

Tips & Warnings

• Add a string of tundra swans, sand-hill cranes, Canada geese or other such big, migrating birds to the sky in the background to highlight the season aesthetically.

References

• "The Deer of North America"; L.L. Rue III; 1989
• "Painting the Drama of Wildlife Step by Step"; T. Isaac; 2002

Resources

• HuntingPA.com: Deer Behavior
• Creative Spotlite: Animal & Wildlife Art Lessons