---
title: "Barasingha swamp deer earned the name ‘twelve-horned’ with antlers that can carry up to 20 tines"
url: https://badiyaa.com/barasingha-swamp-deer-antlers-kanha/
published: 2026-11-15T13:00:00+00:00
modified: 2026-11-15T13:00:00+00:00
section: Pets & Animals
publisher: Badiyaa
---

# Barasingha swamp deer earned the name ‘twelve-horned’ with antlers that can carry up to 20 tines

The barasingha, India's swamp deer, grows 10 to 14 antler tines, and its Kanha herd climbed from 66 deer in 1970 to nearly 1,000 by the 2020s.

Most deer in India stop at three points on each antler. The barasingha keeps going. Mature stags usually carry 10 to 14 tines, and some have grown as many as 20, which is how the species got its Hindi name, often translated as “twelve-horned”.

Also called the swamp deer, the barasingha (*Rucervus duvaucelii*) is a big animal: about 110 to 120 centimeters at the shoulder and close to 1.8 meters from nose to rump, with stags weighing 170 to 280 kilograms. Its scientific name honors the French naturalist Alfred Duvaucel. Coats run woolly yellow-brown in winter and turn a bright reddish brown in summer, and the young are born spotted.

## Three deer in one species

The barasingha once ranged from the Indus valley to Bastar. Hunting and the plowing of grasslands between the 1930s and 1960s broke that range into scattered pockets, and it no longer survives in Pakistan or Bangladesh. Today it is split into three recognized subspecies, each tied to a different landscape:

- **Western swamp deer:** splayed hooves for the flooded grasslands of northern India and Nepal. Nepal’s Shuklaphanta reserve counted 2,170 animals, including 385 fawns, in spring 2013.

- **Southern, or hard-ground, swamp deer:** firmer hooves for open sal forest. It survives naturally only in Kanha National Park in Madhya Pradesh.

- **Eastern swamp deer:** found only in Assam. A 2021 census estimated 868 in Kaziranga National Park and 121 more in Manas.

## The Kanha comeback

The hard-ground deer came close to vanishing. By 1970 Kanha held an estimated 66 of them. Park managers restored grassland and swamp habitat and restricted cattle grazing, which had been spreading disease to the deer. Numbers climbed for decades, reaching several hundred by the early 2000s and nearing 1,000 by the 2020s.

That is roughly a fifteenfold rise from the 1970 low, which makes it one of the most striking wildlife recoveries in India. With the core herd secure, deer have been moved to Satpura, Van Vihar and Bandhavgarh, where nineteen were released in 2023 to return the species to part of its old range.

Big recoveries do not end the worry. Animals outside protected areas are still poached for antlers and meat, and the wetlands they rely on suffer from silting rivers, low summer water and grass and timber cutting. The species is listed as vulnerable, appears on CITES Appendix I and has the highest protection under India’s 1972 Wildlife Protection Act.

## Life in the grass

Swamp deer are grazers, eating tall grasses and water plants and feeding through the day with peaks in the morning and late afternoon. Herds in central India usually hold 8 to 20 animals, sometimes up to 60, with roughly twice as many females as males. The rut runs from September to April, pregnancy lasts about 240 to 250 days, and most fawns in Kanha arrive in September and October.

Compared with chital or sambar, barasingha are relaxed about lookout duty, posting fewer sentries and spending more time with their heads down. When they are alarmed, they let out a shrill, baying call.

Antler rules shape deer herds elsewhere too, as our story on [the Texas Panhandle mule deer antler restriction](https://badiyaa.com/texas-panhandle-mule-deer-antler-restriction/) shows, and the rutting season is under way in North America as well, where [bighorn rams bedded down on a Colorado front lawn](https://badiyaa.com/bighorn-rams-colorado-front-lawn/) this month.

The barasingha is the state animal of both Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, and it turns up ten times in Rudyard Kipling’s “The Miracle of Purun Bhagat” from The Second Jungle Book.

## Further reading

- [Wikipedia: Barasingha](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barasingha)

*Image: Bernard Gagnon, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons*

*This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/).*