Guwahati, March 16: Trekking through the inhospitable terrain of the Himalayan foothills in Arunachal Pradesh, researchers have detected what was known to exist only in Myanmar — “leaf Muntjac”, the world’s smallest species of deer.
The leaf deer, called so because it is small enough to fit into a large leaf, is barely 20 inches tall and weighs approximately 25 pounds.
Zoologists are excited over the discovery of the exotic mammal’s presence in India. With the Myanmar junta rarely allowing outsiders into their land, very little research has been done on the leaf deer.
But with the species becoming the latest addition to India’s large mammal repertory, researchers on wildlife hope to make interesting discoveries about the animal.
Leading the team of researchers from the Mumbai-based Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF) on the deer trail was ecologist Aparajita Datta. The search was supported by the Wildlife Conservation Society of the US.
With villagers as guides, Datta and her crew roamed the wilderness for days. The “hunt” continued until the team spotted a young deer “sprinting at a distance”.
The first phase of the survey covered the Jairampur forest division of Changlang district. “The second phase comprised the Namdapha tiger reserve,” Dutta said. The deer’s (muntiacus putaoensis) existence came to be known only recently. It was discovered in northern Myanmar in 1997 by Wildlife Conservation Society scientist Alan Rabinowitz.
“The discovery in Myanmar had led us to believe that the species should also be present in Arunachal Pradesh,” Datta said.
The NCF and the Wildlife Conservation Society’s India Program launched a survey of large mammals that specifically aimed to establish the occurrence of leaf deer. Information on the possible occurrence was first collected in April 2002 when Datta was studying the hunting patterns of Arunachalis.