Abstract

Faecal pellet characteristics of five ungulate species vizsambar, spotted deer, goat, black buck and Nilgiri tahr were studied. Pellets of all the five species studied were of the same shape but varied in size, of these sambar deer pellets were larger in size and also in weight. All the species have pellets with overlapping attributes like length and width, however weight of the pellets showed maximum consistency among the three parameters. Width and weight shows significant difference between all species. Excepting Nilgiri tahr and goat length also shows significant difference among the species. Length of the pellets were found to be one to one and half times more than the width in all the species. Cluster analysis shows sambar deer pellets form one group and pellets of all other species form another one. The paper deals with the faecal pellet attributes of selected ungulates and shows that pellet weight is the most consistent parameter of a pellet