Encounter: Indian Giant Squirrel

Fluffy and tubby, the Indian Giant Squirrel is a treat to watch anywhere you may wander in the forests of peninsular India from the Western Ghats all the way to Madhya Pradesh

The first tell-tale giveaway of its presence is a crashing and rustling of treetop branches followed, sometimes, by a glimpse of a ruddy brown shape scampering through the high branches. Occasionally, you might hear a loud, percussive call that you can't match to any bird you know of. There's your culprit -- the Indian Giant Squirrel (Ratufa indica).

Popularly called the Malabar Giant Squirrel in the south, it is the largest species of squirrel in the world. Placed in the family Sciuridae in the order Rodentia, these furry mammals can grow up to 3 feet long (including the extremely long tail) and weigh up to 2 kg. This arboreal creature is found in deciduous, moist deciduous and evergreen forests of peninsular India.

Though the squirrel is fairly common throughout the Western Ghats and its foothills, until my trip to Dandeli in northwestern Karnataka I'd had only two fleeting glimpses of the giant squirrel. At the Kulgi Nature Camp (where we Ogres stayed) and at the timber depot in the town centre, the squirrels were so unafraid that they went about their activities without a second look at us. After a while I grew getting tired of their antics. Showoffs!

The Indian Giant Squirrel is usually found in the upper canopy and rarely leaves the comfort of trees. It moves along the canopy from one tree to another through interconnecting branches and, in situations where there are gaps in the canopy, it leaps from the end of one branch to a neighboring tree. They have been known to leap 5 to 6 meters from one tree to another. It uses its long tail for balance. When frightened, this squirrel has the habit of lying flat on a branch, motionless, or hiding behind the trunk. These squirrels are mostly active during morning and evening, avoiding the heat of the day. They can be seen lying flat on a branch catching up on their siesta. They are also known to sleep in the nest if the weather is too cold or rainy.

The Indian giant squirrel is heard more often than seen. Its call is a loud and penetrating series of chucks. Thanks to the other Ogres, I recognized the call for the first time in Dandeli. although I had heard it before.

Indian giant squirrels are omnivorous, feeding on fruits, berries, flowers, bark, eggs, insects etc. Adults are solitary and sometimes found in pairs. The female gives birth to two pups after a month's gestation period. The nests are large and spherical, made with twigs and leaves, and are built on the thin branches for safety from larger predators. According to Prater, an individual squirrel may build several nests within a small area and use them as sleeping quarters.

Two individuals we saw at Dandeli perched low on a (barely) leafless tree and fed on berries. They did not appear to be disturbed by us standing directly below and observing them. They seemed oblivious to aerial attack as well. It was amusing to watch them grasp the berries in their front paws and chomp away while they clung to the branch with their hind-paws.

The squirrels' coats may vary from red to brown to black on the upperparts while underparts may be light cream or white.  Their populations are so fragmented and isolated that several races can be distinguished by colour schemes. This has also given rise to disagreement among biologists regarding subspecies.

Even though the giant squirrel is fairly common in our forests, the most immediate threat to the species is habitat degradation due to logging and encroachment of forest land for agriculture. Sensing the threat, the 130 sq km Bhimashankar Wildlife Sanctuary was created in 1984 at Ambegaon near Pune, Maharashtra.

As we left the squirrels to eat in peace, I couldn't help but imagine that, with their paws clasped together, they were imploring us to help save their kind.

Text and photos: Arun
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Gluttony in the Timber Graveyard

The Timber Depot in Dandeli presents a feast for both bird and birdwatcher, and then some rumination

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.
- Henry David Thoreau

The Timber Depot at Dandeli is a living graveyard, if that oxymoron makes any sense. It stands right in the heart of this sylvan north Karnataka town, which the virile Kali river cleaves in two as it hurries to the sea about a hundred kilometres away at Karwar. One hot afternoon in April, we crossed a bridge over the river (gawking at the heft of an enormous marsh crocodile basking on an islet) and arrived at the timber depot. We had barely entered when it struck us that this place had more hornbills than we had collectively bargained for. 

An enormous mugger basks in the afternoon sun beside the swollen Kali river

It also struck us that the Karnataka Forest Department, like forest departments everywhere in India, exists for the primary purpose of generating revenue from natural resources. For everything else besides timber was an aside, not even meriting a rounding error in its account books. 

In the timber depot large trees, bare of leaves but laden with rotund yellow fruit, stood like fairytale giants, their tentacled fingers stretching skyward. At their feet lay corpses of their kith and kin, their sawn trunks stacked in neat heaps on the dry earth. From towering living things they had been degraded to commodities. Now they were known as rosewood, jackwood, teakwood – wood being the operative suffix. 

A Malabar Grey Hornbill takes a burp break

The evening light softened the mood, lending to the recumbent logs a sobering burnish. Above me, the canopies were aflutter with so much avian activity that I had trouble deciding where to look. We were just recovering from the surfeit of Malabar Pied Hornbills, which were ubiquitous, and gazing with satiated boredom upon flocks of Malabar Grey Hornbills. Glossy-black male Asian Koels and their speckled mates, White-cheeked and Coppersmith Barbets, Plum-headed Parakeets, Pompadour Green Pigeons and Chestnut-tailed Starlings feasted on the cornucopia of yellow fruit, barely shuffling at the disturbance caused by our gawking selves. 

A female Pompadour Green Pigeon makes love to its meal

A Coppersmith Barbet appears to be lost in thought before it takes another bite

Against the relentless symphony of cicadas an Indian Roller sallied about, flaunting its brilliant cerulean hues in vain as we ignored it for the hornbills. A troop of Hanuman Langurs, comprising overgrown adult males, subadults and females with infants, pillaged the trees of fruit and leaves. Giant squirrels stuffed their mouths. Mynas and crows hung around, unable to resist the opportunity to dig in. 


What was this manna that got the entire animal kingdom in raptures, I wondered. I picked up a fallen fruit and bit into it. It was tough-rinded but juicy, not sweet but leaning towards sour, and otherwise unremarkable. It left an acidic aftertaste. I spat it out.

A pair of Malabar Giant Squirrels were delightful to watch as they ate meditatively in the canopy

Yet, with so much to behold, the trees and their supine carcasses haunted my thoughts. Did this charming evening spent at this necropolis signify something more: perhaps the oncoming eventide for all of our great old-growth forests and their guardians, the hornbills? 

As my eyes wandered about the yard, I picked out signs of humanity – the gaudy saris of women ambling down the depot's main thoroughfare presented hopeful hues against the sombre dullness of the trees, and I saw the simple joys of companionship in the resigned contentment of an elderly couple using a hefty log as a park bench. 

Perhaps this forest represented much more than it actually stood for – it was a landmark of nature's resilience, her unstinting will to push on in despite the looming spectre of imminent loss that the great darkness of human civilization would inevitably bring. And then, after our time, perhaps the forest's soul shall be rekindled again, gilded by the hopeful rays of a new sunrise. 

We bade farewell to the sleeping logs before sunset as the sounds of the great feast echoed behind us -- the last suppertime squabbles of the hornbills and the frantic whoops of the langurs as they settled domestic tiffs. There is still a good hour to go before lights out, the birds seemed to think. We might as well eat.

The sleepers that lived and died wait, the far advanced
are to go on in their turns, and the far behind
are to come on in their turns,
The diverse shall be no less diverse, but they shall
flow and unite
--they unite now.


Gluttony in the Timber Graveyard from Green Ogre on Vimeo.


From Sleepers by Walt Whitman

Blossom Showers and Bamboo Famines

Coffee in full flower

Early this week I travelled to Coorg on assignment. Mild spring showers had triggered a riotous explosion of coffee blooms. Planters depend on these early rains, known locally as Blossom Showers, for the next year's coffee crop. The dark-leaved boughs drooped under the weight of the clustered white blooms, and the air was redolent with their jasmine-like fragrance. 

The blooms emit a pleasant fragrance redolent of jasmine

The blooms last only a few days before they wither into dark thready puffs and then expose the incipient fruit buds. These turn into the cherries that are then picked and pulped and dried and roasted and ground before they are packaged into the various brews that become your morning cuppa.

The bloom is an eagerly anticipated event and dictates the prosperity of the year ahead. Interesting, since coffee is a major cash crop, that it also coincided with the last days of the financial year. 

Tree coffee in flower

It was a picture of striking contrast at Nagarahole National Park, where I went on a side-trip. The great bamboo forests, which had stood in tall, dense thickets for over a decade or so, had turned into a ghost landscape of desolate desiccation. Browned by death, the clusters had withered from the inside out and stood like creaking skeletons along the highway that runs inside the forest.

Dead bamboo makes the forest look haunted

Despite their enormous size bamboos are grasses and, depending on the species, they flower at intervals of every 60 or 120 years. The inflorescence is an amazing mass phenomenon and entire forests flower all at once. The fine seeds scatter on the ground providing a rich source of food for a large number of creatures, and are also harvested like rice by humans. 

An Indian roller in the forest

Despite the spectacular plenitude of food that it brings, the large-scale flowering of bamboo is believed to herald the onset of famine. While some people have dismissed this contention as superstition, studies elsewhere have indicated that the sudden transition from a cornucopia of seed-food to a profusion of sprouting shoots in fact leaves nothing for the seed-eaters (primarily rodents). 

Bamboo seeds are also included in the diet of the Malabar Giant Squirrel

Paucity of food forces rats out of the forest to pillage larders and granaries, as well as standing crop fields. A rodent invasion of this scale can (and has, in the past) cause huge losses in traditional storage silos and granaries. Famines of this nature have been documented in northeastern India, where bamboo grows in profusion. 

These contrasting landscapes presented themselves to me within 20 km of each other and I wondered that would happen if bamboo-dependent species such as elephants, driven by the depletion of one of their favourite food sources, turned on crops instead. Conflict alert!

Text and photos by Beej

Malabar Giant Squirrel at Muthodi