The day of the jackal in the city

CHENNAI: Forest Department officials rescued a jackal from a vegetable store at Velachery on Monday.Officials said they received a call from Anand, a resident of Velachery around 6.30 am that a jackal was hiding behind shelves in Ooty Vegetable Store. Following instructions from wildlife warden Karunapriya, a team of forest officials led by S Davidraj, forest range officer, caught the jackal.Officials said that the two-and-a-half-year-old male jackal, around two-feet in height and brownish in colour, could have come from the forest area at Tambaram. “The jackal is healthy and will be kept in quarantine for three days. We will later release him in thick forest,” said Davidraj.The last time a forest official rescued a jackal was in May last year in a residential area at Perumbur, officials said. “It was a three-year-old female jackal that we rescued after chasing it in a residential area in Perumbur. People should not get scared when they see such wild animals. Instead, they can call us so that we can take it back to the forest,” the officer said.Forest officials said Indian fox or Vulpes Bengalenis lives in semi-arid regions, grasslands, forest and foothills of Himalayas as it can hunt for its prey and dig burrows and they are small and slender in size as against the red fox. The Indian fox is reddish-brown in colour and feeds on rodents, reptiles, insects, small birds and mammals, eggs and fruits. Its body length could be around two-feet and its tail 25-30 cm long and can weigh around three to four kg, forest officials said.