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23 spotted deer find new home in Tiruvannamalai

 

 

 

Wildlife officials translocated 23 spotted deer, trapped from various parts of Chennai city, to the Kavuthi reserved forests in Tiruvannamalai about a week ago. This is the second batch that has been translocated from Chennai. In June, 10 spotted deer, including stags, had been driven to the Kalakkad-Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve in Tirunelveli.

 

 

Tiruvannamalai district forest officer R Kirubashankkar told TOI that most of the spotted deer in the second batch were females and that they had been released into an area which already had a spotted deer population. They were expected to thrive in the new place as Tiruvannamalai had received good rainfall and the forests were lush with fresh shoots and grass. This would be a change from Chennai where they often fed on food waste thrown by humans.

 

 

 

The deer also would not face any predators in the Tiruvannamalai forests as these did not have any tigers, leopards, wild dogs or hyenas, Kirubashankkar said.

 

 

 

One of the deer translocated to the Mundanthurai range in the Kalakkad-Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve had been mauled and killed by a leopard within days. This translocation was also one of farthest with the deer travelling nearly 700km to reach their new habitat. Wildlife officials in Madhya Pradesh are known to have translocated spotted deer for 500km.

 

 

 

In Mundanthurai, wildlife officials had used paint to differentiate the spotted deer from the Chennai city, and this had helped identify the leopard kill as an animal from Chennai. In Tiruvannamalai, however, officials have not made any markings to differentiate the translocated animals from the local population, said Kirubashankkar.

 

 

 

 

Source: The Times of India, 12 August 2019, Chennai.