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COUNTRY NOTEBOOK : M. Krishnan : THE GIANT SQUIRREL : The Sunday Statesman :29 December 2019
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THE GIANT SQUIRREL

" The big, handsome Giant Squirrel was a regular visitor to the Range Office at Kargudia in the Mudumalai Sanctuary, during September last. She was wild alright, and completely free to go where she pleased, but over the years she had been accustomed to take tidbits, like crisp biscuits and nuts, from the men there.

In the mornings she usually stayed in the forest around, and could be called up to the trees in the Range office compound with a judicious display of something she specially fancied,but this worked only when she had an appetite;sometimes,when she had already had a good feed off teak or Terminalia tomentosa fruits,or the young leaf of Garuga pinnata or Anogeisus latifolia, she would stay put in the treetops and no amount of calling or the proffer of inducements would bring her down.

I did not try to offer her anything myself; but left this to the men who said she knew then and trusted them, and confined myself to the photography I was using a 10-inch lens focused by guessing the distance and setting the lens on its footage-scale,and a muffled flash to illumine the dense shadows~I had quite enough to keep my fully occupied without also trying to make friends with a stranger.

However, I did notice that the squirrel's readiness to answer the summons of those who claimed that she was actually fond of them was much dependent on how hungry she was, but it could be she did know and recognise them.

This squirrel had a grownup daughter with her when I saw and photographed her last September.The young doe was quite as long as her mother and every bit as richly and beautifully coloured, but much less substantial, and was under a year old.

On occasion the younger squirrel accompanied her mother to the Range Office compound, but was much more wary and shy:she generally kept to the treetops and would not come down the bole to take the nuts or biscuits offered, though sometimes, when some tit bit had fallen to the ground, she would race down, pick it up, and race up the tree again to eat it from a safe height.

When her mother was eating some sizeable morsel, hanging head down and gnawing the food held in her paws (these squirrels, all squirrels in fact, seldom eat food held in their paws when facing the treetop~ when they are going up the bole), at times the younger squirrel would come down to her and nibble the food held in the maternal paws. I was impressed by the tolerance shown by the older squirrel towards her daughter.

I mentioned how squirrels hang head down when nibbling food held in the paws.There is a reason for this. They hang on to the bark of the tree-trunk with their outspread hind legs their sharp, curved claws cannot support their body weight.

Quite often a Giant Squirrel nibbles food held in the paws while hanging head down from a branch, with the long tail pendent from the other side counterpoising the paws and head, and the body weight balanced securely across the bough on the belly. But when hanging down from a tree trunk, the grip of the dug-in hind claws supports the weight of the squirrel, eased no doubt by the fact that the entire body is closely applied to the bole along the abdomen and chest.

I had an acute reminder how efficient the grip of the hind claws can be when I was photographing the big doe.Her daughter was up a tree behind me and decided to share the food. She took a short- cut via my bent head to where her mother was~suddenly I felt something heavy and alive land on my thin-thatched dome,then felt the sharp prick of the claws as the young squirrel took off from by head to the tree trunk on which her mother was.For minutes afterwards,the blood came up in droplets out of the punctured wounds on my nose and scalp.

Watching these squirrels,which do not get un-interestingly tame when not caged,I thought how attractive a feature of many of our sanctuaries they could be, if the officials in charge to not try to tame to tidbits and near human presence, as at the Mudumalai Sanctuary. Giant Squirrels are found all over India in the deciduous forests, and are to be found in most sanctuaries."

- M. Krishnan

This was published on 8 April 1973.

#The photograph of the Giant Squirrel has not been reproduced here.