Last summer I was in a sanctuary area dominated by chital. There were close on 500 of them there, running in half-a-dozen herds, some of which were large stag parties, and they spent most of their time in and around a plantation surrounded by a ravine-cleft scrub, with dense, LOW, thorny jungle beyond watered by meandering streams.From a little PAVILION perched on a rock it was possible to watch the deer as they grazed around the plantation, and one evening I met a visitor from Rajasthan here. There was a herd of some 200 chital a furlong from us, grazing its way steadily through the open scrub towards the peripheral jungle, but he was not impressed by the sight. He told me that in CERTAIN parts of his NATIVE Rajasthan every village could boast of larger herds and once again I was struck by the embarrassment to successful wildlife preservation constituted by our deer, by chital in particular.Actually, of course, the deer are not responsible for this sad state of affairs. We are. And very few, EVEN among the naturalists of our country, seem to be aware of the problem posed by some of our deer, when they are specially protected and the predators that keep them in check are not. As I have pointed out many times already, India has more species of deer than any other country in the world, but luckily for us most of these (sambar and barking deer, for instance) do not live in large herds and are not fast breeders Chital are the best example of purely Indian deer that are highly gregarious and which have an almost frightening potential for overrunning the land. They breed fast, are capable of adapting themselves to a variety of circumstances and environments, and will eat what they can get. Typically they are creatures of park-like, well-watered forests, but they do not hesitate to enter and occupy thin, thorny jungles or even bushy scrub, or to raid plantations and crops. The Deer Park around Raj Bhavan at Madras is proof of the adaptability of these deer, the open dry scrub of the park is typical blackbuck country, but the introduced chital there seem to be doing better than the black buck!noʎ dlǝɥ llᴉʍ ʇᴉ ǝdoɥ