Thursday 10 November 2022
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| Indian Giant Squirrel - Bondla |
Day 5
Today saw us depart the coast for the forests and mountains of the Western Ghats. Our main destination: Bondla Wildlife Sanctuary. This is popular with visitors, and includes a zoo that we thankfully avoided. More interesting was its eight square kilometres of protected moist deciduous forest. Bondla is an outlier from the protected lands that form a corridor down Goa's eastern boundary. Nevertheless, it packs a lot of wildlife into a small area. This blog post focusses on two charismatic Bondla mammal species.
Our first Indian Giant Squirrel Ratufa indica, known in Goa as the Malabar Giant Squirrel, came as a jolt to the senses. It was moving confidently along a twisted electricity wire above the road (above) and barely paused to give us a look. Compared with the squirrels back in the UK, and, frankly, almost everywhere else, these beasts appear genuinely huge. Including the tail, they can be over a metre long - which amounts to a lot of squirrel. And it was the tail that really caught the eye, creating a bright and luminous glow in the morning sunshine.
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| Indian Giant Squirrel foraging - Bondla |
Feeding during the day, mainly on fruits, nuts and flowers,
Indian Giant Squirrels favour tropical evergreen, semi-evergreen and moist
deciduous forests, particularly where mature trees are present. They are
generally found in the high forest canopy, but are happy to descend to lower
levels where food is available. The one pictured above was foraging in a small roadside
bush. The two-tone colouration acts to break up their profile, providing useful camouflage. Raptors are their main predators, but no doubt Leopards (if present) will take them, given the chance.
Endemic to India, Giant Squirrels have a scattered range, with a number of discrete and dispersed populations - see this map on the IUCN website here. This is never a good thing; where populations are fragmented they are more vulnerable to extinction. And although the species is not immediately threatened, being classed as ‘least concern’ by the IUCN, numbers are declining dramatically as forests are felled and habitats are lost. Fortunately, Goa lies in the middle of one of their larger population concentrations, which extends right down the Western Ghats
range from north of Mumbai to Kerala and the southern tip of India.
An even larger mammal was sitting by the roadside just before the Bondla entrance gate ...
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| Bonnet Macaque female - Bondla |
This female Bonnet Macaque (above) was one of a group of five. Bonnet Macaques are the common monkeys of Southern India, where they are an endemic species. Their northern counterpart, with a distribution extending east to China, is the better-known Rhesus Macaque, which lacks the Bonnet Macaque's unusual and distinctive central parting. Bonnet Macaques are engaging creatures; they seem to be treated as both an attraction and a bit of a nuisance by the locals; we saw that (like Vervet Monkeys in South Africa) they tend to congregate in places where they can get food from humans, either offered or pilfered. Although deliberate feeding is banned in Indian National Parks, it still takes place - sometimes for religious reasons, but also out of sympathy for the animals or just to get closer views or photographs (Sengupta & Radhakrishna, 2020). Such feeding has various negative effects, of course, including increased risk of inter-species disease transmission, as well as encouraging the macaques to continue to seek human-provided food from farms and houses.
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| Bonnet Macaque - Bondla |
Bonnet Macaques are
social animals, with hierarchies that are usually led by a dominant
male. Females tend to remain in their
birth groups while males often disperse to find other mates. Within a group, the male hierarchy doesn't remain static. Fights can occur to sort out ranking positions, with higher ranks offering better breeding opportunities. But we saw no evidence of such aggravations - generally they appear to be a peaceable species.
We came across many Bonnet Macaques in the forests of eastern Goa, including this group (below) a couple of days later at the Tambdi Surla temple car park in the Bhagwan Mahavir Wildlife Sanctuary. It is hard to avoid the impression that these are two parents comforting a young one. But given the nature of macaque society, it is more likely that the adults are both females.
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| Bonnet Macaques with young - Tamdi Surla temple car park |
Unfortunately, Bonnet Macaques are in trouble, being given a ‘vulnerable’ conservation status by the IUCN. There have been big population declines (of almost a third in three generations). Feeding by humans is part of the problem, as well as the usual suspects of hunting and habitat loss. But an additional concern is that, in the northern parts of its range, the species is being displaced by its neighbour - the (less threatened) Rhesus Macaque. Wildlife conservation is never straightforward.
References
Molur, S. 2016. Ratufa indica. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2016: e.T19378A22262028. https://dx.doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.UK.2016-2.RLTS.T19378A22262028.en. Accessed on 22 March 2024.
Sengupta, A. and Radhakrishna, S. (2020). ‘Factors predicting provisioning of macaques by humans at tourist sites.’ International Journal of Primatology, 41(3), pp. 471-485.
Singh, M., Kumara, H.N. & Kumar, A. 2020. Macaca radiata. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2020: e.T12558A17951596. https://dx.doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.UK.2020-2.RLTS.T12558A17951596.en. Accessed on 22 March 2024.
