COIMBATORE: It has been five days and the mother elephant of the calf that died at Bokkapuram reserve forest near Singara range on Sunday, is continuing to hover over the carcass. A routine patrol exercise had led to the discovery of the carcass of a calf, aged a year and a half, in the forest on Wednesday. When Forest department staff returned to the spot to attend to the autopsy, they found three adult elephants – the mother, a female and a tusker – keeping the calf out of reach. They continued to put up the resistance on Thursday too, and the day after and the next day too.
Forest officials were being chased away at every attempt to get closer to the carcass. Forest Range Officer S Kaanthan informed that all attempts to divert the elephants back into the reserve forest had been in vain. “The mother is aggressive. We suspect that there is a high chance for the animals to enter the tribal village – two kilometres from where the carcass was found – if we continue to divert them using crackers,” he explained.
Foresters remarked that this was highly unusual behaviour for elephants, who generally walked away with the first hint of foul smell from the carcass. Here, however, the animals were only taking breaks from their guard duty to drink water from the check dam nearby. They had been relentless in their effort to keep the foresters away.
“We are unable to monitor the elephants after dark since it is a reserve forest and they may charge at us anytime. They easily identify out sound and movement and charge at us. The have damaged a department jeep in a past few days,” Kaanthan noted.
Another case
A parallel could be the example of certain species of monkeys, who were known to watch over young ones’ carcass till they rotted completely, only to carry away the bones
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