Kinloch says that it used to be found on the islands in the Indus, but is now almost extinct there. By all accounts it seems to prefer the neighbourhood of Sál forest.
The antlers of the swamp deer are peculiar. The beam is rather slender, the brow antler very long, there is no median tine, and at the top the head becomes almost palmated. The full-grown stag carries three antlers on the top, two of which (the outside antlers generally) are bifurcated equally, as if the antler had been split and bent outwards; each horn having thus six points, including the brow antler. Colonel Erskine says that he has never seen a head with more than fourteen tines, but Jerdon speaks of seventeen. In Schomburgk’s deer (an allied form found in Siam), all three prongs on the top are bifurcated. The difference between the two varieties is very noticeable in the British Museum, where the horns are placed side by side. Sterndale says that in Schomburgk’s deer the très and royal tines are equal, whilst in the swamp deer the très tine is longer than the royal.
In the high grass of the Terai and Assam, swamp deer are generally shot off elephants, but in some parts of Central India the ground is open enough to permit of their being stalked. Forsyth gives a capital account of the sport he enjoyed while hunting them in the Sál forests of Central India. Swamp deer are gregarious, and Jerdon quotes from an article in ‘The Indian Sporting Review’ a case of three large herds being seen on one plain. The general colour of the beast is a light yellowish red, paler in the winter than in the summer; the under parts and below the tail are white. The hinds are lighter coloured than the stags, and the fawns are spotted. The stags appear to shed their horns about March or April, as, Forsyth says, they lose the velvet at the close of the rainy season; he also says that they shed their horns more regularly than the _Rusinæ_. The following quotation from his charming book gives an excellent account of their habits:
This animal has been called in North-Eastern India the ‘swamp deer,’ but here (Central India) he is not observed to be particularly partial to swampy ground. These deer graze in the mornings and evenings in the open valley, chiefly along the smaller streams, and by springs where the grass is green, and rest during the day about the skirts of the Sál forest. A favourite midday resort is in the shade of the clumps of Sál dotted about the open plain, at some distance from the heavy forest. They are not nearly so nocturnal in habits as the sámbar, being often found out grazing late in the forenoon, and again early in the afternoon; and I do not think they wander about all night like the sámbar. Their midday rest is usually of a few hours only, but during that time they conceal themselves in the grass much after the manner of the sámbar. I have never heard of their visiting cultivated tracts like the latter; nor can I learn that their apparent adherence to the Sál forest is due to their employing any part of that tree as food.