HoustonPat, I wasn't going to say anything, but when you said "keep an eye out for scale on stags and birdnest..."....well, I just could not hold my peace. Boy are you right!! I was keeping my collection of young stags and birdnests on my south/east/west side sunporch last winter, with a fairly large scheffelera. First thing I know, sticky mess everywhere. Oh yeah, it was scale. I ended up murdering the scheffelera as a scale magnet, and then I went to work saving my ferns. I have some that I dearly love. So I totally concur with what you say about scale. And, I put several of my stags in a north facing bathroom, which had clerestory windows giving constant bright light for this winter period. I spritzed them down, and they did fine. But then I tend to rotate things instead of leaving them always in one spot. I also immersed the entire stag fern to deep water the inside of the board and moss, or in a couple of cases, the SOIL. Then this spring I moved them outdoors where they have been flourishing very well, with some supplemental watering during our dry spells. If you have a plant in such a location as a bathroom, it will not be a "set it and forget it" matter.

From what can be seen of the fertile fronds they seem quite healthy. The sterile or nest fronds are just the plants 'home made pots'. I wouldn't worry about them. The plant will produce more when it feels the need. Although I agree that it's a bit unusual for the nest fronds to completely brown off before they start getting covered by new ones. But while the fertile fronds look very healthy I wouldn't worry.

You'd generally have high relative humidity so that will give you a lot of leeway. Within the nest leaves is a network of branching rhizomes from which individual plants grow. You can tease out these individual plants and grow them separately. Done in the rainy season there should be rapid recovery. As long as the moisture is there and the humidity is high you shouldn't have any problems. I've never seen them growing on steel poles, not sure what a high dose of zinc from the galvanising would do.

I'd be inclined to treat it as a bifurcatum, that's likely how it's been treated so far and is doing well. The thing to keep in mind is that epiphytes live off rain water, some town water is loaded up with chemicals. Over watering can cause problems, even though they're mostly a rainforest plant in nature they do get a fairly dry winter. It's a very nice plant and with the right name you can also search out the best advice on it. There's a couple of dozen different species of Platycerium, I've only grown P. superbum and P. bifurcatum but would like to get a P. veitchii.