About the Blackbuck
The blackbuck is one of India's most elegant antelopes, with the fully adult male displaying one of the most dramatic colour contrasts in nature — jet black on the upper body and face contrasting with brilliant white below, framed by long spiralling horns that can reach 70 cm in length. Once numbering in the millions across the Indian subcontinent, the blackbuck was hunted almost to extinction during the colonial era and by the mid-20th century had declined catastrophically. Today the population has recovered to around 50,000, with the Velavadar Blackbuck National Park in Gujarat holding one of the world's densest concentrations.
The blackbuck's famous twisted, V-shaped horns grow in a corkscrew spiral of up to four to five turns in mature males, and are the defining feature that has made this animal iconic across millennia of Indian art, literature, and mythology — the blackbuck was the vehicle of Vayu, the wind god, and its effortless galloping gait at 80 km/h inspired the comparison. Velavadar hosts up to 10,000 blackbuck and also attracts Indian wolves that hunt them and thousands of winter raptors including the globally rare lesser florican.
- Velavadar (Blackbuck National Park) in Gujarat is the world's best place to see blackbuck — herds of thousands run across open grassland in spectacular displays.
- Male blackbuck turn darker with age — old dominant males are near-black compared to young males which are brown. Watch for territorial displays and spiral-horn clashes.
- Guindy National Park in Chennai has a small but accessible blackbuck population for visitors in South India.