IWN Series: Antlers & Antelopes of India — Part 1

Ask most people what lives in India’s forests and they will say tiger. Ask a little further and they might add elephant, leopard, rhino. They would be right — but they would be missing half the picture.

India is home to one of the world’s most remarkable collections of deer and antelope. It has the only four-horned bovid on the planet. It has a deer that nearly vanished from the earth and came back — in a single national park. It has an antelope so fast it has been clocked at 80 kilometres an hour across open grassland. It has a stag so critically endangered that fewer than 300 survive in the wild, tucked into a single valley in Kashmir. It has an antelope whose wool was once smuggled across the Himalayas as one of the world’s most lucrative wildlife crimes.

The tiger gets the headlines. These animals get the tiger its dinner.

Deer and antelope — what’s the difference?

Both are hoofed herbivores that share India’s forests and grasslands with tigers, leopards, and wild dogs. But they belong to different families. Deer (family Cervidae) grow antlers — bony structures shed and regrown annually, almost always found only on males. Antelope (family Bovidae, which also includes cattle and goats) grow horns — permanent structures of bone covered in keratin, found on males and sometimes females. India has representatives of both, spread across every major habitat from the Himalayan high-altitude cold desert to the mangrove swamps of the Sundarbans.

The cast

Over the coming weeks, IWN will profile each of India’s principal deer and antelope species in turn — their biology, their habitats, their conservation status, and the stories that make each one worth knowing about.

The series begins with the Chousingha — the four-horned antelope found only in India and Nepal, and the only living bovid with four horns. From there we move to the Barasingha, Kanha’s signature species, pulled back from the very edge of extinction. Then the Blackbuck, India’s fastest land animal and the focus of one of the subcontinent’s most extraordinary conservation traditions. The Chital, so numerous and so beautiful it is easy to take for granted — until you realise how much of India’s food chain depends on it. The Sambar, large and solitary and largely invisible. The Hangul, the Kashmir Stag, whose survival now hangs on decisions being made in a single valley. The Nilgai, India’s largest antelope and one of its most complicated human-wildlife conflict stories. The Chinkara, built for desert heat and sparse water. The Tibetan Antelope, whose wool once funded one of the Himalayan region’s most ruthless wildlife crimes. And finally the Indian Muntjac — the barking deer, heard by almost everyone who has ever been in an Indian forest, seen by almost no one.

They are, each of them, worth far more than a footnote.

The series continues with Part 2: The Four-Horned Antelope — the world’s most unusual bovid, found only here.