I paid a visit to this scenic campus today for some reason. It is an humungous campus touching three different areas in Chennai. Yes, it has a Main gate which touches Adyar, two side gates - one at Velachery and one at Taramani. I drove until the Taramani gate and I spotted a Blackbuck, which is tagged as endangered! Apparently, I learnt, that this happens to be the area where the Blackbuck seem to have inhabited themselves.
The Picture you find here is a picture of a Blackbuck on campus. Overall, there are only around 15 Blackbuck in the IITM campus. I found 5 of them at one shot. Perhaps, the male Blackbuck is one of the most elegant antelope I have seen.
Besides, Blackbuck I also found an Owl and sad that I could not click a pic of it!
There are huge number of Spotted deer which are common to all the Science institutes in and around Guindy - IITM, Anna Univ, Birla Planetarium, Guindy national Park and also the Raj Bhavan! If you go back to history, this is one of the non-native species which was introduced to these establishements int he 1940s.
When I got back home, I discovered that IITM houses a huge number of Fauna. There is a huge variety - Bats, Jackal, Anteater, Satrred Tortoise, varitey of snakes, Open billed storks, Water hen, Pond heron, kite, Teal, Egret, a variety of butterflies etc., Wow! Such rich Bio-diversity!
There is a foundation called Prakiti, a wild life club at IITM and you can find more information about the wide-variety of plants and animals found here.
http://hsb.iitm.ac.in/~prakriti/florafauna.html
P.S. I had read this book sometime ago - "Catch Me a Colobus" where the author Durrel speaks of his experiences of maintaining the zoo and allso about his expeditions to the forests of Africa to gather some species to add in his zoo.
1 comment:
i find like 40 of them outside my house all the time. they eat from the garbage! sad :-( so much for endangered species :'(
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