Giant Malabar Squirrel

The Giant Malabar Squirrel is a magnificent animal found in thickly wooded evergreen and deciduous forests, mainly in the Western ghats. Spotting the squirrel is quite difficult and I was lucky enough to catch a glimpse of this rare and beautiful mammal in the well maintained SIMS Park in Coonoor. 

It is hunted for its pelt and meat and is now found only in small regions of the forest, living in upper canopy of the trees.

 It has conspicuous rust-brown and beige colors, is large in size, with head and body about 40cm long, and a bushy tail almost 60cm long.

Extinction

It is greed which causes us to hunt animals for their pelts and meat, threatening their survival and ultimately leading to extinction. The Indian cheetah is an instance of extinction, caused due to excessive hunting over 60 years ago.  On the other hand, extinctions due to natural causes are a fact of life. In the course of Earth’s history, there have been several instances of large scale species extinctions. As one species becomes extinct, another takes its place due to the continuous evolutionary process. Some of the species may have altered forms to survive drastic climatic changes in environment and it is quite possible that the species that we see today are descendents of those assumed to be extinct.

For the past thousand years or so, Earth’s climate has been relatively stable, with no catastrophic natural events leading to mass extinctions. This was also an ideal period for large numbers of diverse species to thrive and grow in numbers. It was only with the advent of humans into the New World that several plants, birds and animals were threatened and became extinct. The human population explosion in the last few decades, especially in India and China, has caused widespread damage to the environment. According to some experts, if we continue to grow at this pace and destroy the forests, species extinction rate could be in thousands every year.

In India, the situation is worse due to lack of awareness and government controls; animals are being constantly confined into smaller and smaller pockets of wilderness in the midst of human habitats, their movements getting severely restricted. As forests, wetlands and wildlife habitats are destroyed, one can only hope that future generations are lucky enough to sight wild animals in their natural habitats, before they are wiped out from the planet.

Birds and animals definitely do deserve an opportunity to live along side humans.