India.
The land of Bollywood, curries, Gandhi, cricket fanatics and the world’s largest democracy. The country is such a dizzying assault of otherworldly strangeness that is easy to forget that India holds some of the most beautiful and unique animals in its jungles.
From the astoundingly agile clouded leopard to the eccentric-looking lion-tailed macaque, India certainly holds its fair share of weird and wonderful creatures. Below are eight of these alluring animals.
1. Clouded Leopard
- This beautiful Asian cat, named for its spotted coat, is seldom seen in the wild, and its habits remain mysterious.
- Clouded leopards roam the hunting grounds of Asia from the rain forests of Indonesia to the foothills of the Nepali Himalayas.
- The clouded leopard is considered to form an evolutionary link between the big cats and the small cats. It is the smallest of the big cats.
- They are often referred to as a “modern-day saber tooth” because they have the largest canines in proportion to their body size, matching the tiger in canine length.
- Clouded leopards are the most talented climbers among the cats. These big cats can even hang upside down beneath large branches, using their large paws and sharp claws to secure a good grip. They can also safely climb down a tree headfirst, like a common squirrel.
2. Hoolock Gibbon
- Hoolock gibbons are almost entirely arboreal, coming to the ground only in exceptional circumstances.
- It is the only ape native to India.
- During the morning in the winter, hoolock gibbons will “sunbathe” in high branches exposing their backs to the sun for several minutes at a time.
- Hoolock gibbons generally sleep with the knees tucked up into the chest and the arms around them in a hunched position.
- They swing from tree to tree in a mode of locomotion known as brachiation, and can brachiate at speeds up to 55 km/hr, covering as much as six metres in just one swing!
3. Asian Lions
- Nearly all wild lions live in sub-Saharan Africa, but one small population of Asian lions exists in India’s Gir Forest in the Gujarat state.
- Asian lions once prowled from the Middle East to India. Now, only 500 of these magnificent animals survive in the wild. The Gir Forest’s dry teak woods were once a royal hunting ground. Today they are a reserve where the endangered Asian lions are heavily protected.
- It differs from the African lion by a smaller temporal bone, a larger tail tuft, and a less developed mane.
- Since 2010, the lion population in the Gir Forest National Park has steadily increased.
- The Asian lion is one of five big cat species found in India. The others are the Bengal tiger, Indian leopard, snow leopard and clouded leopard.
4. Lion-tailed Macaque
- The lion-tailed macaque lives in forested areas in the Western Ghats, a mountain range in southwest India.
- The Old World monkey has a magnificent mane of hair around its face that makes it look like a lion.
- It also gets its name from its tail, which has a tuft of fur at the end, just like a lion’s tail.
- It’s a good climber and spends the majority of its life in the upper canopy of tropical moist evergreen forests. Unlike other macaques, it avoids humans.
- Its outstanding characteristic is the silver-white mane which surrounds the head from the cheeks down to its chin, which gives this monkey its German name Bartaffe, “beard ape”.
5. Indian Purple Frog
- These unique, purple frogs live in the Western Ghats of Southern India.
- It was only formally identified in 2003. However, it was already well known to the local people.
- The frog spends most of the year underground, surfacing only for about two weeks, during the monsoon, for purposes of mating.
- The frog’s reclusive lifestyle is what caused the adults to escape earlier notice by biologists, and hence delay its scientific description.
- They don’t even need to come up for food; they are able to live on a diet of the food that exists underground, which is mainly termites.
6. Sloth bear
- Shaggy, dusty, and unkempt, the reclusive sloth bear makes its home in the forests of South Asia.
- Emitting noisy grunts and snorts, it wanders alone, usually at night, in search of insects and fresh fruit.
- Sloth bears are the only bears to carry young on their backs.
- In the late 1700s, the first Europeans to see sloth bears described them as bear-like sloths due to their ungainly appearance and long claws.
- The Hindi word for bear—bhalu—inspired the name of Rudyard Kipling’s bear character Baloo in The Jungle Book.
7. Golden Langur
- The golden langur is a particularly attractive leaf-eating monkey found in northeastern India and Bhutan.
- As its name suggests, the coat is a beautiful golden to creamy white, gaining a more reddish tinge in winter.
- This monkey was only “discovered” as recently as 1956 and is found in Bhutan and in the state of Assam in northeast India.
- Due to a serious population decline, the golden langur is listed as endangered.
- The overall shape of this primate species is slim, with long limbs and tail. The tail has a tassel on the end and is notably larger in males than in females.
8. Asian Palm Civet
- The Asian palm civet, found throughout the jungles of Asia, is also known as the common palm civet and the Toddy cat.
- Asian palm civets are not felines at all but are in fact more closely related to other small carnivores like weasels and mongooses.
- Unlike other civet species, the tail of the Asian palm civet does not have rings, instead the face of this species is banded like that of a raccoon.
- These nocturnal animals are highly terrestrial as they mark their ranges by dragging their anal glands along the ground. These glands emit a nauseating secretion as a chemical defense when threatened or upset.
- Kopi Luwak, or civet coffee, is the most expensive coffee in the world. It is produced from the coffee beans which have been digested by a palm civet.