Ten Days in Tadoba - Part 4

Ten days in Tadoba

Part 4: The Supporting Cast or What tigers like to eat.

Chital, or Spotted deer, are the deer species that have got it all. Saying that does not come easily to me. My first memory of wildlife, and one of the earliest memories I have, is of roe deer. I was riding on my father’s shoulders on a family Sunday afternoon walk when we were startled by a roe buck and a roe doe charging across the path in front of us. Their loud barking alarm call, the sight of them flying across the path and off through the trees, is one of the things that sparked my interest in natural history. Roe have been a constant interest and fascination for the intervening 46 years since that time. So to admit that my wonderful lifelong companions, by far the prettiest and most interesting of the British deer, might be second in the “Best in Class” category is a real wrench.

Chital can be found in most of the forest habitats in India. They have a similar lifecycle to European deer. The males grow new antlers each year. The bone is covered in blood-rich furry skin or ‘velvet’ until fully grown when the velvet dries out and starts to peel away. The males rub it off by thrashing their antlers against trees and bushes, giving vent to their increasing aggression as they come into breeding condition. They put on weight, especially around their forequarters and neck, their coats become thick and sleek and the colours deepen. They enter the breeding period, or rut, and look for females in oestrus with whom to mate, calling repeatedly to attract attention and challenging any rivals. The big difference between India and Europe is that this process is seasonal in our cold northern climes, but in the heat of Maharashtra it goes on all the time. So at any one time you can see males in full rut, males that have just shed their antlers, males with new antlers in velvet and fawns of every age.

Chital can be appreciated in the full panoply of their behaviour and biology. You can always see the most charmingly pretty fawns, massive, darkly handsome males and winsomely beautiful females. The males, in rut, have a dark chestnut coat that sets off the bright white spots. They have a black gorget patch on the throat and pale markings on their faces that make them seem to be frowning ferociously at you. The fawns are born all year round, so there are always delectable lamb-like deer gambolling around the females as they walk gently through the jungle.

A male chital, in full breeding fettle.

A group of female chital at the water's edge, wary of tigers and crocodiles, they didn't hang around.

The other common deer is the Sambar. This is a large, bony deer. Not handsome, but very impressive. They have long, shaggy coats that are a uniform brown, but can show up with a coppery tinge in evening light. They have long faces with very prominent scent glands at the corner of their eyes. These large, puckered holes are bare of hair and look more like a deformity than an organ. Their legs are very long and they move with a grace that implies huge strength. For all that strength, their gait is uncertain. The weight always on the hind legs, head and neck nodding as if in trepidation of what lies underfoot or just ahead. They move as if they are walking through a minefield. The males can get very big, with thick broad antlers that give them a grandeur that puts the Monarch of the Glen to shame.

A full grown male sambar

A young male sambar, very much at home in the water.

Gaur are called Indian Bison, but as is so common with mammals, it is a misnomer. It is not a bison but a true bovine, a wild species of cattle and the most impressive of its kind. The bulls run to weights in excess of a tonne. They stand over six foot at the humped shoulder and their massive frame supports a truly prodigious gut.

Gaur have the most gorgeous chocolate coat colour, lighter in the female (which is like Green & Black’s dark milk chocolate) and almost black in the male (90% cocoa solids). Both sexes have white bobby socks that make them look as if they got dressed up specially and the calves are just very lovely with huge brown eyes that would melt the heart of a pantomime villain.

Female gaur.

Male gaur, showing the huge gut that hangs from their massive frame. The white socks which are characteristic of the species can be seen.

The first thing that strikes you about Nilgai is their size, they are bigger than a horse, and they
are gracefully beautiful. It is a true antelope, but it’s meat is forsworn to Hindus as for religious purposes the animal is regarded as a cow; which just goes to show that irrational bureaucracy is not a new thing on the sub-continent and can’t all be blamed on the British. They are also called Blue Bull. The male is a magnificent beast with impressive horns and a slaty-grey coat colour that looks a bit bluish in the right light. They have an interesting arrangement with the local birds at each waterhole. I watched a female sidle up to a stand of bamboo in which several rufous tree-pies were hopping about. As soon as she stopped they hopped onto her back then walked jauntily down to her rear end and inspected under her tail for insects. Another alighted on the ground under her and peered upwards, springing up to her belly whenever it saw something crawl through her fur. When they finished taking ticks and flies off her, she moved away.

Like kudu, which they resemble in many ways; they have the most terrific ears. Huge, sensitive, mobile, fringed organs that definitely have minds of their own as they swivel about, twitch up and down expressing emotions as much as capturing sounds.

An adult female nilgai and two juveniles take a quick drink at the waterhole.

Chausingha have got four horns – how cool is that? Count ‘em. Two more than any other antelope on Earth. Except in the female of course and I didn’t get any shots of a male so you’ll just have to believe me. They are delicate, fragile, silent creatures that prance and tip-toe through the jungle thickets, rarely seen during the day. This lovely female and her grown-up daughter came out of the jungle when I was in a crowd of jeeps watching over a waterhole for a tiger. I was so excited that I immediately swung the lens around and started to take pictures. No one else was in the least interested. They saw a small, brown deer-thing that isn’t even tiger-food. I saw a rare, uniquely adapted animal that blessed me with a wonderful view of it’s beautiful self.

Female chausingha with young.

Indian muntjac are not like the smaller, more aggressive Chinese Reeve’s muntjac that we get in the UK. They are slightly bigger – about roe-sized – with huge eyes (adapted to night-time life) and an even deeper pre-orbital gland. I had some great views of these pretty little deer. Unlike Reeve’s muntjac, you tend to see the females more often that the males. From the verandah of my room at the Lodge, after 10 pm when the external lights were put out, it was muntjac, the “Barking Deer”, that I listened for. Their alarm call is far more reliable than chital or sambar. When they bark you know two things: a tiger or a leopard is definitely there and the ‘there’ is close to the deer because they inhabit thickets and can only see their predators at close quarters.

Female muntjac, showing the deep pre-orbital and forehead glands with which she scent-marks trees and shrubs to mark her territory and communicate her readiness to mate.

Now, talking of tigers ...

The next instalments of Ten Days in Tadoba will return to our favourite subject!