GENERAL

WILD ANIMALS AND BIRDS

The district was previously reported for Wild Game and it is no wonder that the hilly country with many valleys and ravines must have formed an ideal natural abode for Wild Life in the forests. However, due to indiscriminate hacking of the forests coupled with unrestricted poaching in the past, the Wild Game has dwindled to such an extent that it is difficult to come across a tiger or panther in the area where encountering a tiger was very frequent [Colonel Nightingale has been reported to have banned as many as thirty tigers in two seasons]. The specie is now practically extinct in the district.

Panthers (panthera pardus) are also very few in number, and are found in comparatively wooded and sheltered pockets. For want of adequate natural food in the forest, they often wander out of the fringes abutting on cultivations and into the bordering hamlets in search of stray goats, dogs and other possible prey.

Of the horned game small sized chital (axis axis) and some solitary chinkaras (gazella bennelti) are found, the former nowhere in sizable herds. Wild boar (sus cristatus) and jackals (canis anreus) are fairly common; the former find nourishment from the agricultural crops as well as tubers and bulbs of forest species especially the climbers and annuals and cause considerable damage to the marginal cultivated areas as well as to the root stocks of tender shoots of forest plants.

Among monkeys, the langur (semnopithecus antellus) is common. They live on tree-tops near the water-holes or invade nearby vegetable or fruit gardens causing extensive damage.

Owing to the poverty of habitat reflected in the open stocking of the forest and general scarcity of water, the bird population is also meagre. Even the most common game birds like pea fowl (pave cristatus) and grey jungle fowl (gallus sonneratti) are rarely encountered. The hardy squirrel (sciurus spp) and the prolific hares (lepus seficandatus) are the only common animals found practically everywhere.

The smaller bats are almost all insectivorous. They are actually useful to the forest growth as they destroy hoards of injurious insects.

A number of rats, mice and Indian porcupines are found in the forest areas everywhere and cause considerable damage to the roots of the young plants in afforestation plantation areas taken up by the Forest department.