Himalayan Goral is a goat-antelope; an adult with 65–70cm height and 25–30kg weight (Baral & Shah 2008). Both sexes are mostly alike; having a short tail and two about 15cm long brown-grey horns which grow backwards. It has short and coarse grey coat with a lighter white patch of hair on throat; the males have manes from their necks to their chests, and females have four mammae (Baral & Shah 2008). Himalayan Goral has two recognized subspecies, Naemorhedus goral goral in Bhutan, China, India, & Nepal, and N. g. bedfordi in India & Pakistan (Duckworth & MacKinnon 2008). The recent study shows that the subspecies recorded eastward from Nepal is N.g. goral and westward from Nepal is N.g. bedfordi (Joshi et al. 2020). Nepal may have held both the subspecies.
From the beginning of civilization, humans have had an important relation with water bodies. Most of the cities are situated around water bodies whether, a lake, river or an ocean. Even villages are established around ponds to meet the daily needs of humans. One-thousand-three-hundredand-forty (1340) bird species are reported in India, out of which 310 species are known to depend on different water bodies (Kumar & Gupta 2009). From last few years, local people use ponds for the production of Water Chestnut Trapa natans commonly known as Singhara. Ponds, whether natural or manmade, sustain their ecological properties and these are hubs of biodiversity (Karakaş 2017). Wetland birds assemble at these sites due to plenty of food and habitat accessibility (Paracuellos 2006; Cereghino et al. 2014). Ponds also channelize the migratory birds from one place to another as flock of birds use these ponds as stopover and refueling destinations for few days during their migration before moving towards their final destination (Hassall 2014). Most of the earlier studies in Punjab mainly focuses on avian diversity of the wetlands (Bal & Dua 2010) but with this study authors acknowledge the importance of village ponds in context to avian diversity.
