SAMBAR SAND-PITS OR PLAYGROUNDS?

FEATURE Ken Slee

In the absence of any evidence as to how they were created and used by the deer, the best suggestion was that they were just rather unusual sambar wallows. But if scent transfer by stags was a key aspect of wallowing behaviour, creating a ‘wallow’ on dry sand rather than in mud made little sense – it seemed that there could be more to the story.

As wild sambar doing their thing are almost impossible to observe, what was really needed was trail camera footage to reveal just how the deer used these sand patches.

Moving on, numerous similar ‘sand wallows’ have been found in another area and it now appears likely that they are common on ancient sand dunes wherever they occur along with sambar in East Gippsland. These additional sand patches all share the same characteristics of the first ones – dry white sand, lots of hoof prints, scrapes and beds, along with surrounding rubs and preaching trees. It has also become apparent that these sandy features are not a substitute for mud wallows as these are always found nearby on soils that better hold water.

Trail camera video now indicates that a better description for these bare patches of churned up dry sand might be ‘sambar playgrounds’ or ‘sambar sand-pits’ rather than ‘sambar wallows’. They are visited by lots of deer, both male and female and across the age classes from calves through to mature stags. Like conventional wallows used by sambar, they are clearly centres where the deer get together to investigate what others in their group are up to and to socialise.

Animal behaviour recorded on cameras, besides merely visiting, included pawing with forefeet, play-fighting, buck-jumping, cavorting and preaching. One mature stag that visited was sexually aroused and sprayed urine when he visited but didn’t get down and roll in the sand as he would have done in a mud wallow. This indicates that transfer of scent around a wider territory was not a part of his activity.

So, what description best describes these rather unusual and up-until-now poorly described features? ‘Sand Wallow’, ‘Sand-Pit’, ‘Playground’ or some other words or combinations of words?

However we describe these places, they do illustrate another part of sambar behaviour, an aspect that goes to make them such an interesting hunting proposition.