After launching Project Nilgiri Tahr last year for the conservation of the State animal, Tamil Nadu is now working on a standardised protocol to count the endangered population of southern India’s only mountain ungulate. The Tamil Nadu Forest Department will also propose to its Kerala counterpart to conduct a synchronised census, as the animal is only found in select habitats in the two States.
For the first time, drones may be incorporated in the census, as the Nilgiri tahr prefers montane grasslands, with steep and rocky terrains at an altitude between 300 and 2,600 metres above sea level. There are believed to be a little over 3,100 of the animals living in highly fragmented habitats in the Western Ghats in Tamil Nadu and Kerala, ranging between the Nilgiris in the north and the Kanniyakumari hills in the south, according to a 2015 study by WWF-India.
