COUNTING THE CHAMOIS

Southland Times, Issue 23141, 6 March 1937, Page 15

COUNTING THE CHAMOIS

EXHAUSTIVE CENSUS WORK IN TATRA MOUNTAINS BUDAPEST, February 7. The newspaper Pesti Naplo gives an interesting account of the chamois census in the Tatra Mountains, which is probably the first census of chamois to be taken in the world. Chamois can be found only in three parts of Europe, the high Tatra, the Transylvanian Carpathians, and in the Alps. The object of the census is to ascertain how many chamois may be shot during a season without endangering the continuation of the stock. Last year 65 chamois were shot in the Tatra, principally by foreign guests. The difficult task of counting the chamois over a territory of twenty thousand hectares, not including the Polish part of the Tatra, is being performed by about eighty employees of the Czechoslovakian forestry department.

The territory has been divided into reviers, in each of which a forester and a controller count the chamois which pass in groups of ten or fifteen to the grazing ground. Each revier is controlled for three days. When the census is completed only an approximate figure. can be given, however, as the chamois wander from place to place, coming over from Poland, or returning there. It is believed that from 1200 to 1300 chamois inhabit the Tatra.

M. Bethlenfalvy, a Hungarian estate owner and chamois expert in that district, states that during 50 years’ observation he has found no change in the number of chamois. A single kid is bom to each pair, and is prepared for with a kind of nest made of grass and lichen. ‘ .

He declares that when a chamois is seen with more than one kid the second has invariably been adopted as the chamois mothers are punctilious in looking after kids which lose their own mothers by a gun or by an accident. In November, during . the breeding time, the old bucks, which live apart from the herd, come- down to fight and frequently despatch the young bucks, which are found dead at the foot of the cliffs. Unlike the stags, which eat fodder in hard winters, the chamois refuse food provided by human beings. When there is no sun or wind to uncover the grass on the rocks, the chamois fast for as much as two weeks. The Emperor Francis ■ Joseph, it is said, owed many of his successes in diplomacy to an invitation for . a chamois hunt. A white chamois is . a rare occurrence, appearing about once a century, and according to superstition a man who shoots a white chamois must die within a year. In the autumn of 1913 the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who was hunting in Murzsteg, was warned not to shoot a white chamois which had been seen grazing alone. The Archduke, however, ignored the warning and brought the white chamois down!