The Mammals of India

The Mammals of India: A Systematic and Cartographic Review

Anwaruddin Choudhury

2016  

Gibbon books and The Rhino Foundation for Nature in NE India

Forestry Bureau, COA

ISBN 978-93-80652-04-7

Some random observations

Glance

Significantly more details of mammals occurring in the region east of Calcutta owing to the Author’s almost unparalleled experience of the region. Mammals in the region, as he states in the preface, cover 65 per cent of our country’s mammals.

Colin Groves, in the foreword, describes the book succinctly as ‘this book fills a real gap, it lists synonyms, cites relevant literature and importantly makes thoughtful assessments of taxonomic claims and counter claims’. He adds that ‘the author begins with surveys of environment and biogeography, and then conservation, before going on to his listing’.

Chapters

There are topics that one does not come across in books on similar lines. While these additions are welcomes one wishes the book had gone into details. Chapter 3 touches upon ‘Species likely to occur’; while details of species in Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal and China are brought out succinctly by the author someone familiar with Rajasthan or Pakistan could have been roped in to bring out the proverbial meat in the discussion for species occurring on or beyond our western boundaries. Similarly in Chapter 4 which talks of ‘Free ranging or feral domestic animals’ it would have been good to know if these species warrant conservation attention or the kind of studies taking place.

In the chapter on conservation one wishes hunting and jhum were put across in a more nuanced fashion; jhum, in either case, appears to be dying a slow death while hunting is a major threat in many landscapes across our country.  Threats from plantations especially oil-palm that currently appears to be the biggest threat to biodiversity, in the region east of Calcutta, could have been covered.

Others

I did not get the dictionary meaning of a ‘cartographic review’. However, The Oxford Dictionary of Ecology had this to say of Zoogeography - The study of geographical distribution of animals at different taxonomic levels, particularly of mammals from the order down to species level. Emphasis is given to the explanation of distinctive patterns in terms of past and /or present factors, particularly migration routes.

At the first look it appears somewhat scattered but then as one flips pages things fall into place.

Images and other details at the end of each Order may have been helpful.

Comparison

While this is not meant to be a field guide, for the sake of understanding how this stood in comparison with more popular of our field guides, I tried to look up two species in both, one from the region where the author has wealth of experience and the other from the fringes of western India. The other book being Vivek Menon’s Indian Mammals: A Field Guide. Menon’s book talks of behaviour, habitat, social unit, size and has images along with. While Choudhury’s book mentions type locality, nomenclature, extra-limital distribution, describes sub species, mentions zoogeographic regions and carries references. In addition to these where species are from the region Choudhury’s book has an unparalleled list of local names and rich observations. Interestingly the distribution did not match for the very first species I read up in both books! While these books complement each other the questions are  would the Author’s previous book The Mammals of North East India have served this purpose and whom is the book catering to?