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Indian giant squirrel
शेकरू (shekru)
A squirrel the size of a cat, maroon and cream, that lives entirely in the canopy and can jump six metres between trees without touching the ground.
👀 How to recognise it
Watch the canopy for a heavy branch bouncing. The tail is longer than the body and hangs straight down when the animal feeds.
Protection
Schedule II, Wildlife (Protection) Act 1972
Where to see it
Mysore
Bandipur was the driest forest in a Karnataka survey of the squirrel and had the fewest: about 2.4 per square kilometre in 1999, four to five times fewer than in the wetter forests of Bhadra.
Bandipur Tiger Reserve (often)
Gokarna
The sacred groves of Uttara Kannada (devarakadu or kan forests, protected by villages for their deities) are among the reasons canopy species like this still survive in patches near the coast.
Yana Rocks & Bhairaveshwara Cave Temple (in season) · Vibhuti Falls
Kochi
It builds several football-sized leaf nests across its territory and rotates between them, so a healthy patch of forest shows a scatter of untidy balls high in the canopy.
Thattekad (Salim Ali) Bird Sanctuary (often) · Athirappilly Falls (often)
Mumbai
The state animal of Maharashtra, called shekru. It never comes to the ground, so the continuous canopy along the park's older forest roads is exactly what it needs.
Sanjay Gandhi National Park (in season)
Pune
The state animal of Maharashtra, shekru. Bhimashankar, on the Ghat crest north-west of Pune, is the sanctuary most closely identified with it, and the easiest place from Pune to see one.
Tamhini Ghat Waterfalls (in season) · Mulshi Lake
Tirumala
Talakona, at 82 metres the highest waterfall in Andhra Pradesh, sits inside the 353.62 sq km national park notified in 1989, which in turn forms part of the Seshachalam Biosphere Reserve designated in September 2010, India's seventeenth.
Talakona Waterfall (in season)