In a new light

On July 2012, the Western Ghats were added to a growing list of World Heritage Sites around the world that celebrate human endeavour and natural splendour. The hill range has long enjoyed iconic status among people interested in nature and wildlife. One organization, Conservation International, branded it as one among 34 “biodiversity hotspots” in the world. And now UNESCO has formally recognized what wildlife enthusiasts have long known: The Western Ghats are a wonder of the natural world, on par with the more famous Ngorongoro Conservation Area, Tanzania.

However, only a third of the original 160,000 sq.km. of forests in the Western Ghats is left. The UNESCO status does not extend to the entire hill range or even to what remains of the natural vegetation. After a rigorous process of evaluation, a cluster of 39 sites was identified, of which 19 are located in Kerala, 10 in Karnataka, six in Tamil Nadu and four in Maharashtra. These reserve forests, tiger reserves, wildlife sanctuaries and national parks cover an area of almost 8,000 sq. km. and are already governed by the Wildlife Protection Act, the Forest Conservation Act and the Forest Rights Act.

Jagdish Krishnaswamy of the Ashoka Trust for Research in Environment and Education (ATREE) says these sites represent “exceptional natural beauty, major geological features, have examples of ongoing biological and ecological processes, and habitat for biodiversity to flourish. These sites are along the rainfall gradients from south to north, west to east, as well as a range of habitats from swamps, grasslands, and streams to thick rainforests.”

The Western Ghats are not the only natural forests to be declared a World Heritage Site in India. In 1985, Manas National Park and Kaziranga National Park in Assam and Keoladeo National Park in Rajasthan were India’s first, followed by Sunderbans National Park in 1987 and Nandadevi and Valley of Flowers in the Himalayas in 1988. More than 20 years later, the Western Ghats have become India’s sixth site to achieve this distinction.

The Heritage Site tag will magnify international attention on the conservation of these areas. Donors readily fund projects in such locations, while the world media is also likely to highlight any threat to such Heritage Sites. By nominating the Western Ghats, the Government of India has tacitly undertaken to do everything in its powers to provide security for these forests in the future.

It’s likely the high profile of this listing will bring more tourists to the Western Ghats. These are fragile ecosystems; more footfalls can jeopardize their existence as we know them today. While a few areas are well-known tourist destinations like Periyar Tiger Reserve, some of the sites have no facilities and are unlikely to play host to anyone but the most persistent researcher. Besides, the Ministry of Environment and Forests has recently issued guidelines to regulate tourism in all protected forests.

Not only the rich array of life forms, but about 150 million people live in the humid hill range. Krishnaswamy says, “It is the most densely populated biodiversity hotspot in the world. Yet, grasslands that were formed 40,000 years ago still persist despite human development all around. It’s a really unique place.”

What if India fails to safeguard a World Heritage Site? In November 1999, Hampi’s spectacular ruins of the Vijayanagar empire, another World Heritage Site, was put on UNESCO’s List of World Heritage in Danger. The Karnataka government had begun construction of two bridges – one for pedestrians and the other for vehicular traffic – spanning the Tungabhadra without seeking required clearances from the Archaeological Survey of India or the Hampi World Heritage Site Management Committee. Worse, the state had callously removed a historic monument that was in the way of one of the bridges.

UNESCO feared vehicles using the bridge would cause pollution, and the vibrations would undermine some of the historic structures. Even the walkway caused offense as it was built right beside the Virupaksha temple. In January 2000, the global body threatened to strike Hampi from its prestigious list of Heritage Sites and demanded an immediate halt to construction.

However, local people really wanted the bridges. Until then, the only means of crossing the river was by coracles. When the river was in spate, even that option was unavailable. Farmers could not carry their produce to markets unless they walked several kilometres to reach a truck-able road. If the local people couldn’t receive the benefits of development just because of the World Heritage Site tag, they didn’t want it anymore, they said. They filed a Public Interest Litigation in the Karnataka High Court demanding the construction of those bridges. No doubt, there were politically vested interests fanning the agitation for the bridge but that doesn’t diminish the legitimacy of the local people’s aspirations for a better life.

The Central Government pressurized the state to comply with UNESCO’s demands. The state government was torn: It didn’t want to stop a project that had already cost Rs. 4 crores, but at the same time, if Hampi lost its coveted tag, the state wouldn’t receive funds for maintaining the monuments. Besides, there was the people’s 50-year-old demand for the bridge.

Finally in June 2003, UNESCO granted provisional approval for the vehicular bridge but demanded the foot bridge be dismantled. Further, it insisted a bypass road circling the ruins be built first before work on the bridge could resume. In five years, the bridge would have to be relocated. Locals resented even this compromise. They asked why should an international body, aided by people living in Delhi and Bangalore, interfere with their local development projects.

On the afternoon of January 22, 2009, barely two months after work resumed, the bridge collapsed, killing eight and injuring 35. The authorities are scoping the area for a site to build a new bridge that would be acceptable to UNESCO. All the necessary paperwork will have to be cleared before construction can begin. Ironically, present-day residents of Hampi have to use coracles, a risky mode of crossing the river, while 600 years ago, the residents of the Vijayanagar empire traversed a bridge across the river Tungabhadra.

In 2006, Hampi was taken off the List of World Heritage in Danger. At this time, biologists along the Western Ghats were engaged in the process of compiling data to nominate the Western Ghats as a World Heritage Site. Many conservationists believe we should be proud of the global recognition for the hill range. At the very least, it could do no harm. However, such tags wield enormous power to interfere with local people’s rights and aspirations.

Perhaps more than global recognition, the Western Ghats need regional and national appreciation. In a country where forests are undervalued and unappreciated, an international tag could have done the trick of getting local people to cherish the treasure in their own backyards. But with Karnataka raising the pitch in its opposition to the UNESCO recognition, the space for conservation has narrowed considerably.

http://travel.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?281791

Circumventing the elephant

Published in Current Conservation 4.4

Farmers of the rainforests of Nigeria, Africa constructed an extensive network of earthen walls and moats. Astonishingly, in some places, the walls are 20 metres high and the moats 20 metres deep. What makes this even more remarkable is that Sungbo’s Eredo (meaning “Sungbo’s Ditch”) is thought to have been built around 1150 AD on the orders of a childless matriarch, Bilikisu Sungbo (although the dates don’t add up, locals believe that she is none other than the Queen of Sheba). The fortifications span 160 km encompassing an area of 1400 km2, the size of Delhi. Nearby Benin City has even more spectacular walls and trenches, extending 16,000 km and covering an area of 6,500 km2. This is thought to be the single largest archaeological phenomenon on the planet, an enterprise larger than the Egyptian pyramids. The zooarchaeologist, Juliet Clutton-Brock, believes they may be evidence of man’s earliest elaborate defense of crops against elephants. However, conflict with these pachyderms is thought to have started much earlier, when man first began to till the soil.

A millennium later, the range of devices that farmers use to keep elephants at bay is a tribute to the ingenuity of both, animals and humans. The simplest and most widespread (perhaps the oldest) practice is guarding crops through the night from tree top machans (or ground level tunsis, rickety shacks sometimes protected by a trench, used in north Bengal and Assam). When elephants are spotted, the vigilant farmers set up a cacophonic racket by lighting fire crackers, banging plates or rattling other noisy implements to scare the animals away. When extended families lived together, men took turns at guard duty. Now that nuclear families are the norm, the burden of chasing elephants falls on the man of the household night after night; hiring guards is not an option for poor farmers. The price of inadvertently falling asleep after a long day’s labour is catastrophic: the loss of the family’s sustenance for the next few months.

If an animal is repeatedly chased away from food, it gets irritable and elephants are no exception. Humans who haven’t slept well for days become crotchety. When bad-tempered members of two species confront each other, the stage is set for tragic accidents. The elephants’ dark coloration renders them almost invisible at night and drowsy farmers on patrol have been maimed or killed. Bursting fire crackers can goad elephants to take out their aggression on buildings or machans. Feeble torch lights, the barking of dogs and even a solitary human voice can cause a frustrated elephant to charge, sometimes with fatal consequences. Guarding crops is probably one of the most dangerous occupations in elephant country and several villagers tilling marginal lands have abandoned farming altogether.

In parts of elephant country, farmers complain that none of the commonly used methods such as torch lights and bursting fire crackers work anymore. In north Bengal and Assam, farmers have resorted to chasing elephants using mashal (a spear tip surrounded by a flaming ball of rags), birio (indigenous sling shots), poison arrows, flaming arrow heads, jute (fire balls on sticks), cycle tyres set afire, and more. Some of these cause grievous injuries to elephants and the pain can ramp up their aggression. In areas where damage caused by elephants is particularly high and farming has become unsustainable, men emigrate to cities for work leaving their wives to guard the crops. One agitated woman in Upper Kolabari village (north Bengal) shrieked, “We used to think that elephants were god, but not anymore. If they are killed, then finally there will be peace.” Eventually when she calmed down, she complained that she hadn’t slept for weeks and the stress of managing the farm and family while her husband was away was sapping her energy. The despondent woman was only voicing her threats, others more intolerant carry them out - they kill elephants with home-made guns, electric wires hooked up to high tension cables, and poison or explosive filled pumpkins.

In an effort to aid the beleaguered farmers, almost every division of the Forest Department in north Bengal and Assam forms a squad to chase elephants away during the harvest season. Depending on the obstinacy of the herd, it may take a few hours to a full night’s work to complete the job and the squad can only rush to one or two sites per night. On jeeps, tractors or trained elephants called kumki, they fire blanks to drive wild elephants away. One beat officer claimed proudly, “The elephants won’t budge if your vehicle goes, but as soon as our jeep arrives, they start moving.” During the harvest season, the field staff of the Forest Department is stretched to the limit, performing their regular duties through the day and chasing elephants every night without overtime or other benefits. On the other hand, farmers complain that these squads are inadequate and that the elephants return to the crops once the squads leave.

Perhaps the one method that has gained mythical powers of stopping elephants in their tracks is the electric fence. The non-lethal pulses of high voltage power carried along steel wires, unpleasantly jolts a barging elephant, warning it to stay away from the farm. As ingenious as it sounds, electric fences are no panacea. Desperate elephants have learnt a variety of tricks to get through fences – toppling trees onto them, using their tusks to rip or the soles of their feet to step on the wires and even running into them bringing posts and wires down! In Kenya, removing the tusks of eight fence-breaking bull elephants did not stop them from breaking 20 electric fences in the following five days. Once an elephant loses its fear of electricity, no fence, however sophisticated, appears to stop it.

Several NGOs in different parts of India are testing and implementing different methods of protecting crops from elephants. Perhaps the simplest innovation is the creation of voluntary youth groups to watch for elephants from machans. Young men spend their evenings playing card games while keeping an eye out for the pachyderms. Some of the other experiments range from using thorny plants to create a ‘biofence’, alternate inedible cash crops, bee hives along the perimeter of farms, trip wire alarms that alert sleeping farmers to the presence of elephants, and delivering chilli’s pungency through a variety of means (smoke, spray, paste smeared on a rope surrounding the crops). Some of them have shown initial promise but that is mainly because elephants stay away from anything new and unusual; if they put their minds to it, they seem to eventually overcome these obstacles. This talent inspired the ancients to create the elephant-headed god, Ganesa or Vinayaka, the super-human clearer of obstructions.

The crucial factor that determines the success or failure of any conflict resolution measure seems to depend on the elephants’ desperation for crops. In areas where there is abundant natural forage such as the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve, elephants that are tempted by agricultural goodies, can be deterred by any of the methods. But in places such as Kodagu (Karnataka), Assam, north Bengal, Orissa and the Northeast where the assault on forests is intense and unrelenting, hungry elephants rely on human agricultural enterprise for their survival and they will overcome any challenge that man erects between them and the food they crave. Confining these giants with gargantuan appetites to fragmented insubstantial forests using fences, trenches, or walls is bound to fail (and unethical); but should these measures work, the elephants will in all likelihood eat through the forests and worsen the situation. Enriching the habitat by planting fodder, trees, and bamboo in elephant country has been suggested, but little is known of its efficacy.

We cannot hope to be successful by gnawing away at the habitat with one hand and with the other, curbing, altering and manipulating elephant behaviour and movement according to our convenience with the expectation that they will obey. That’s like trying to staunch a hemorrhage with several little band-aids. Wildlife managers are constantly on the look-out for measures that work decisively against elephants under any conditions, but unfortunately, there are none. At best, using the various measures in combination, changing them frequently and constantly improvising will buy us some time while a long-term habitat protection strategy is developed.

Conflict is caused mainly as a result of human actions, and this has to be at the heart of any attempt at resolution. Elephants are only compensating for what they have lost. In other words, it is not the elephants that are badly behaved, it is us. According to Project Elephant, 3% of India’s land surface is elephant country and of this, only 10% is affected by conflict. It is still possible to achieve a more amiable relationship with elephants if we put our minds to it and this is the time to do it before we irrevocably lose more elephant habitat.

Sugarcane leopards

Published in Current COnservation 4.4

Most of Akole valley in the Indian state of Maharashtra was formerly semi-arid and drought prone. When rains allowed, farmers grew crops such as pearl millet, sorghum, and safflower. In the 1980s with the aid of irrigation, intensive cultivation began. From a dust-bowl, Akole valley was transformed into a lush mosaic with dense stands of sugarcane, rich velvety green of banana fronds and rangy stands of corn. Set amongst them were smaller plots of onion, sorghum, wheat, cauliflower and other vegetables grown for the wholesale markets of Mumbai. The scraggly hills that form a jagged horizon to the west were dry and sparsely covered in brush with a few tree plantations. Nothing in this landscape could be remotely described as an archetypal forest where wild mammals might roam through thick, concealing vegetation.

People here make a living through agriculture and animal husbandry. At one end of the spectrum, rich farmers focus on lucrative sugarcane and imported Jersey cattle while at the other, poor tribals survive on marginal rain-fed agriculture and graze goats on the scrubby hill slopes. Nomadic shepherds make seasonal migrations from further afield so their animals can forage on the fallow fields. Although little of this landscape is set aside for conservation, a large golden cat spotted with black rosettes prowls amongst the tall cane fields in the fertile green valley. Locals know there are leopards around, some have seen them, others have heard of them and some have lost of calves, dogs or goats.

How is it possible for large predators to live with humans in a rural area? Asking this big question are Vidya Athreya, a wildlife biologist and Sunetro Ghosal, a social scientist.

Prior to stumbling on this modern-day Eden, Athreya had spent a few years studying human-leopard conflict in a neighbouring district where 47 people had been mauled in three years. Throughout the past centuries and across countries in Africa and Asia, leopards have attacked thousands of humans and killed scores.

Why do leopards attack people? Are we just easy meat? Over the decades, several explanations were trotted out such as man-eaters suffered from debilitating injuries, broken canines, too few prey animals and/or little water in the forest, infrastructure development disturbing forest stretches, increasing numbers of leopards, improper disposal of corpses giving the scavenging cats a taste of human flesh, and loss of fear of people. But no definitive study actually supports any of these contentions.

Athreya declares that studying a situation where leopards and humans are able to coexist peacefully in an agricultural landscape provides the key to understanding why the cats maul people elsewhere. To this end, both Ghosal and Athreya set up their studies in Akole with funding from the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Delhi and the Research Council of Norway in Oslo. The Centre for Ecological Sciences (CES) and Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (NINA) provided scientific stewardship under their joint 'Wildlife-human interactions: from conflict to coexistence in sustainable landscapes' project.

What do these rural leopards eat? One relatively simple way of answering this is to examine the hair remains found in scats. Leopards, like several other wild cats, defecate on paths. In forests where trails are few, droppings are easy to find. Where do you begin to look for leopard excreta in the maze of paths crisscrossing a 300 sq.km agricultural area? What if these rural cats keep a low profile by avoiding paths and people altogether? To maximize the search effort, the team of research assistants spread wide, scouring hills, fields, towns, roads, paths, dry stream beds, every type of habitat. To their surprise, it wasn’t all that difficult to find leopard scats; they were everywhere!

The hair remains teased out of the excreta were examined under a microscope. In the absence of the usual wild prey such as deer and monkeys, these leopards were living mostly on dogs, feral pigs and livestock. The few wild animals on the menu were smaller still: mongooses, civet cats and rodents.

How well do leopards survive on this diet and landscape? Can agricultural fields hold thriving populations of these big cats? To answer these questions leopards had to be enumerated, but how? Each leopard can be identified by its unique pattern of spots so camera trapping offers a scientific way of counting individuals. Since both flanks of an animal are not identical, a pair of cameras was fixed facing each other. Twenty pairs of camera traps were set up in 40 sites over an area of 136 sq.km. for 30 days to estimate the density of leopards.

The camera traps were placed in areas where scats were numerous and where there was evidence of leopard activity such as pugmarks, scratches on trees. Although the team interviewed people, Ghosal found that those who did not own goats or dogs were hardly aware of the presence of leopards. For instance, although one lady said that she had never seen a leopard and denied that there were any around, one was caught on camera ten feet away from her house!

In the final tally, five adult males, six females and four cubs were distinctly recognizable in the photographs. Once the area of the trapping exercise was adjusted, the density came to as many as 5 leopards living in 100 sq.km of farmland! More remarkably, that same 10 x 10 km area also supported five striped hyenas and about 357 people! Clearly agricultural areas were rich hunting grounds for these wild cats. Other animals that triggered the cameras were rusty-spotted cat, jungle cat, and jackal.

Were these leopards seasonal migrants from the closest forest taking advantage of the abundant feral prey?

When an old leopard (named ‘Ajoba’) that fell into a well was rescued by the Maharashtra Forest Department, Athreya affixed a GPS transmitter around his neck. As is sometimes the practice, he was released about 60 km away at the western edge of the district boundary at Malshej Ghats. Thereafter, his GPS location was pinpointed every day by satellite and an international SIM card tucked in the collar transmitted this information by SMS to the NINA server in Norway. All Athreya had to do to access Ajoba’s location was log onto the server. As a backup, the collar also held a traditional short range VHF transmitter so should the GPS malfunction, the animal could be traced using a handheld receiver.

A translocated leopard typically returns to the site of its capture or ranges randomly over long distances, either lost or attempting to find its home; rarely does it settle down at the site of release. A few days after Ajoba’s release, contrary to expectations, his GPS tracer began to dot westwards on the map, in the opposite direction from the site of his capture. He crossed the busy Mumbai-Agra National Highway, and through the Kasara railway station giving Athreya several anxious moments. Stranger still, Ajoba didn’t linger at either Tansa or Tungareshwar Wildlife Sanctuaries but continued onwards crossing the Vasai Industrial area near Thane, on the densely populated outskirts of Mumbai city. After twenty five days on the move, he entered Sanjay Gandhi National Park and the GPS points stayed clustered in a 25 sq.km  area for almost six weeks; he seemed to have settled down.

Then inexplicably Ajoba took a swim across the 100 metre Ullas River into the main section of the Park but returned. This may have caused the collar to malfunction as all further transmission stopped. Before settling down, Ajoba had traveled 120 km, and at several locations was very close to people. Remarkably not once did anyone notice the leopard. It is only because of his collar that we are aware of this wild cat’s extraordinary journey from the Ghats to the coast. Since Ajoba was quite an old animal, and had consistently walked in a single direction before settling down, the team doesn’t think he was lost; he was sure of his destination.

A leopardess caught in Nanashi, near Nashik, was collared and named Sita. She was in an advanced stage of pregnancy when she was released 50 km away. For a month she tried to return unsuccessfully. Then she gave birth at the site of release and her mothering instincts overruled the urge to return home. She hid in the forests during the day and prowled through neighbouring villages at night hunting dogs and goats. Four months later, when her kittens were old enough to follow, she returned home to Nanashi. Over the subsequent eight months, until the collar dropped off, she prowled a 25 sq.km* area.

Neither of these two animals’ case histories reveals the life for a typical leopard in Akole’s sugarcane fields. Then along came Jai Maharashtra, a young leopard and Lakshai, a leopardess. Although these animals were caught in separate locations, it was immediately obvious that they were related. After being radio-collared, Lakshai (who was missing a canine!) emerged from her drugged stupor and made a beeline for Jai. Eventually DNA testing showed that they were mother and son.

For the first two months after Lakshai had a litter, Jai, the dutiful older son, was always close at hand, staying with the kittens so their mother could go hunting. Perhaps leopards are not the solitary beasts we have been led to believe.

Compared to Ajoba and Sita’s long distance treks, Jai and Lakshai hardly moved at all. The resident animals holed up in sugarcane fields all day and emerged at night to hunt dogs and pigs within a range of 25 sq.km*. Schooled as I was in the paradigm that large wild cats belong in tall undisturbed forests, this revelation came as a shock. Until this moment, standing with Vidya just metres away from a hidden leopard, I had expected these cats to live in a wilderness area somewhere and make occasional forays into the sugarcane fields. But their GPS points clearly indicated that these leopards lived in farmlands 24x7. If they were ever translocated to a forest, it would seem like an alien world just as it would to any farmer! Leopards have long known to be adaptable animals, but in this landscape they act just like large pussy cats, keeping stray animals under control.

How do leopards use this landscape and when are they active? Most crucially, why don’t these leopards attack people? Do they wait until all human activity on the farms ceases at night before venturing out to hunt? To her surprise, Athreya found that the time stamp on the camera trap pictures showed that people and leopards were using the same paths at approximately the same time, often within minutes of each other. Since rural Maharashtra suffers all-day power shut downs, farmers visit their fields at night to turn on their water pumps. And this was also the time when leopards were prowling the pathways looking for prey, or patrolling their territories.

Despite living in such close proximity, what are the reasons for the lack of conflict? Athreya avers that we still know too little about the drivers of conflict but offers that inappropriate management such as translocation may only aggravate conflict. Continued collaring of animals, studying their movements and interactions with one another will provide a better understanding of when and why large cats attack on humans.

What factors promote tolerance towards dangerous predators in one’s neighbourhood? Ghosal’s social science study revealed that peoples’ attitudes to leopards were coloured by a three-way tension between their religious-social backgrounds, political-legal frameworks, and economic loss-insecurity (both personal and livelihood). Tribal and pastoral communities worship Waghoba and Waghjaimata, local deities symbolized by tigers or leopards. Combined with this religious ethic, tribals see themselves embedded alongside these predatory cats in a single dynamic landscape and do not apply for compensation even when they lose livestock. They also take greater care of their animals, so loss is minimized.

However, they feel powerless when Forest Department not only denies access to grazing on the hill slopes, but they believe the Department releases leopards in the hills to prevent them from grazing and collecting firewood! It is also worth mentioning that fewer leopards are found in the marginal areas used by tribals where there is little shelter or prey. Despite their weak politico-legal leverage, the strength of their religio-social backgrounds and ability to prevent losses has led to a positive attitude to leopards.

At the other extreme, a minority of rich urbanized farmers feel that these “government-owned” cats have no place outside protected forests. So they use their political clout to lobby for the removal of leopards. Since these farmers are negligent about securing their calves and goats, they suffer more losses to the predators and thus feel vindicated in their attitudes. Their disaffection is inadequately appeased by compensation. Yet, leopards thrive in these sugarcane fields because farmers leave them unmolested.

Most others have adapted to the presence of leopards in the landscape; some say they walk after dark in groups, armed with torchlight, and usually talk loudly so they do not inadvertently bump into a large cat. They also claim that leopards do not confront people but should it happen, they would give space for the feline to walk away. A lot of families confidently sleep out in the open while all the livestock and poultry are secured in enclosures.

New values such as seen in wildlife programs on television also exert a positive influence on people’s perception of the wild cat. Many take pride that leopards live in their midst and that researchers are studying them. All this has promoted tolerance of these cats in this landscape.

For instance, some women who were weeding, calmly watched a leopard walk past. Moments later, in the next farm, workers threw stones and sent the feline scurrying for cover. In the melee, one or two of them were scratched and they complained to the Forest Department. When the local official approached the first farm owner for permission to place traps on his land to catch the leopard, he flatly refused. None of his family or workers was hurt by the feline, he argued.

This study underscores the fact that leopards are being sustained in high densities in rural areas because of the easy availability of stray dogs and feral pigs. There are an estimated 128 dogs per sq.km in Akole town and around 3000 pigs in the township. With such easy pickings in abundant supply at their doorsteps, these fat wild cats do not need to undertake strenuous walks, and therefore their home ranges are small. Since the density of dogs is higher near towns, so too are leopard densities. On numerous occasions both Lakshai and Jai were within the town, walking between houses. Although DNA analysis of samples obtained from the scats is yet to be completed, Athreya made a preliminary identification of 20 individuals. Not surprisingly, six adult leopards were stalking and hunting dogs and pigs in a 4 sq.km town of 20,000 people. There were clearly more leopards lurking around Akole town than in the surrounding countryside.

During further study, Athreya has found similar situations where leopards live with people without conflict in other agricultural areas in India. It could even be the norm rather than the exception. Clearly when there are so many wild animals living outside protected forests, a policy for their conservation and management needs to be drafted. If these numbers of leopards are deemed too high, the most appropriate management measure would be to clean up towns reducing stray animal populations. Local Forest Department officials require crisis and people-management training in order to perform their jobs better. Compensation payments for livestock losses should be made less tedious and bureaucratic; it should be linked to effective protection so those who take better care of their livestock are rewarded, and support provided to those who lack the resources to adequately protect their animals.

Thanks to Indian cultural and religious traditions, most rural people are amazingly sympathetic to leopards, as long as humans are not harmed nor alienated from resource or land use in the name of conservation. If our management policies build on this existing foundation, people are more likely to share farmlands with large cats and accept them in their midst. This could set a precedent for the conservation of large predators in villages and farms across India and the world.

Bowling for Stumpy

Edited version published in DNA on 27 Feb 2011

Stumpy, the cricket ball wielding chubby blue elephant is the mascot of the World Cup to be inaugurated on the 19th February. Ironically nowhere is this more appropriate than in Sri Lanka where the hosts will play Canada on 20th February, and Pakistan against Kenya on the 23rd. The venue of these clashes is the newly commissioned 35,000 seater Mahinda Rajapaksa International Stadium set in the middle of a coastal forest where Stumpy’s real life kith and kin battle with humans for their very survival.

Throughout this landscape, developmental projects sit amidst natural splendor. On either side of the broad slick Hambantota Bypass road, irrigated banana fields, tsunami rehabilitation settlements, the flashy international conference centre that may host the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting were carved out of the elephant’s forest. Besides, an international airport (imagine the sales line, “arrive in a jumbo jet in jumbo country!”), a seaport and a railway line are in different stages of completion. Within a decade, Hambantota has transformed from a sleepy village to an enormous township in a hurry, fuelled by President Rajapaksa’s ambitious plans for his home constituency. It could be a run-of-the-mill development versus conservation story but it may not be, not just yet anyway.

About fifteen years ago, the Walawe Left Bank Irrigation Project brought perennial farming to the area. Then as more and more infrastructure projects were slated to come up, the Wildlife Department was asked to move the elephants to a nearby National Park. In 2006, a drive was launched to herd the estimated 100 elephants out of this 600 sq.km area. But imagine their surprise when they mustered about 250 elephants into the Lunugumvehera National Park. Even more amazingly, elephant biologist Dr. Prithiviraj Fernando estimates that between 300 and 400 elephants were left behind that continue to forage in the remaining 300 sq.km. of forests in the greater Hambantota area.

Strangely, the fate of elephants in the Protected forest was worse than the ones having to battle the developmental juggernaut sweeping through their forests. First the calves died inside the Park, followed by some adults; the rest, in poor condition, pace helplessly along the electric-fenced boundary, looking for a way out. It has been suggested that there is not enough foliage to support such a large population of elephants and it is just as likely that they are home-sick.

Outside the Park, people’s problems with the animals escalated despite removing half the area’s population of elephants. True, the pachyderms had lost about 300 sq.km. of habitat to the new developments and there were choice irrigated crops such as bananas, sugarcane, and coconuts for the picking. But these elephants, that had been subjected to the trauma of tens of thousands of firecrackers, people screaming and shooting at them during the attempt to drive them to the Park, had become fearless. Formerly shy retiring animals, they were now quick to lose their temper with any farmers who had the temerity to chase them. Out of desperation, people resorted to diabolical methods of maiming elephants by hiding explosives inside pumpkins. In this grim scenario, a World Bank funded project hopes to not only resolve these problems but create a unique Managed Elephant Reserve (MER) (under the National Elephant Conservation Policy 2006), a balancing act between development and elephant conservation.

For starters, the area’s zoning maps until the year 2030 have been overlaid with elephant distribution coordinates so any infrastructure plans necessarily includes the animals. A few members of the Hambantota elephant herds are being radio tracked to get an understanding of their use of the landscape and reaction to disturbance. This knowledge will feed into the overall management of the area for elephants. However, the biggest challenge facing the project is encroachment inside the newly conceived Reserve. People want land for cultivation, house plots, and some indulge in just plain outright land grabbing. Although the MER allows existing practices such as rainfed agriculture, it cannot sustain elephants if the habitat is splintered, fenced and diverted further for human use.

The Hambantota elephants are not alone in their plight. Whether it’s Sri Lanka, India, Burma or Thailand this is a tension riddled equation for both elephants and their human neighbours. At least here in southern Sri Lanka elephant biologists are being given the mandate to give the pachyderms a fair deal by the developers. Can Stumpy become the mascot for the development-and-conservation paradigm?

The best laid schemes of tigers and men

Published in Governance Now, 26 Feb 2011.

The media leaves little doubt about the dire straits that we find the tiger in today. Millions of dollars are raised at home and abroad to secure the future of this magnificent beast. But the people who are paying dearly for the conservation of the charismatic big cat are the unglamorous local people who have had to quietly forsake their homes and traditional livelihoods to make way for the tiger. Here is an example of what’s happening across tiger reserves in the country.

In November 2010, the Soliga tribals of the Biligiri Rangaswamy Temple Sanctuary wrote a bitter letter to Jairam Ramesh, the Minister for Environment and Forests, asking to be poisoned first before turning the Sanctuary into a Tiger Reserve. The adivasis are not opposed to tigers; nor do they begrudge the enormous financial allocations being made every year for wildlife while their own lot remains depressingly the same. The real core of their anxiety is the 370 sq.km that is destined to be declared a Critical Tiger Habitat under the Wildlife Protection Act (WPA). Should this happen, about 1000 tribal households belonging to eighteen hamlets have to be relocated to create an exclusive zone for tigers. It is worth noting that over the last few years, the number of tigers in the sanctuary has increased even with the presence of these people and it is therefore debatable if such a radical move is necessary for tiger conservation. Be that as it may, at the very least, the tribals have to get a fair deal as is mandated by law.

Section 38-V (5) of the Wildlife Act says that before the notification of a Critical Tiger Habitat, the rights of local forest dwellers have to be honored, the possibility of coexistence ruled out, their impact on wildlife assessed, and if irreversible, only then shunt people out with the approval of the gram sabha (a village assembly that includes all the adults). Further, they need to be provided a package to resettle in a place that has all the basic amenities. A fair law! On paper.

In reality, there is a gaping fracture between words and action. Had the Soliga adivasis been taken into confidence from the beginning, when the proposal to make their forest a Tiger Reserve was being drafted, it’s unlikely they would have taken such an antagonistic stand. In this vitiated atmosphere, it’s doubtful if their gram sabhas will provide “free informed” consent to their own transfer of residence, one of the prerequisites for declaring an exclusive tiger haven. But resistance hasn’t deterred eviction of forest dwellers from other Tiger Reserves. When a range of basic amenities are lacking and hopes of making ends meet recede in the distance, their defiance eventually breaks down. Often, this is how “free informed” consent is obtained.

In addition to Critical Tiger Habitat, the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers Act, 2006, popularly referred to as the Forest Rights Act (FRA), mandates declaration of Critical Wildlife Habitats under Section 4(2) which stipulates the same actions as WPA.

The twin towers of critical habitats – the Wildlife Act and Forest Rights Act – mention fuzzy concepts such as, “irreversible damage”, “coexistence” and the more problematic “inviolate” without defining them. In 2007, a consortium of public service-minded organizations and institutions took it upon themselves to not only elaborate on these terms but also set out the criteria and protocols for declaration of these exclusive habitats. To this day, the advice stands ignored.

Even within the twenty-member Joint Ministry of Environment and Forests-Ministry of Tribal Affairs Committee, set up to investigate the implementation of the FRA, two contradictory views prevailed. One said ‘inviolate’ does not mean free of humans and that pursuit of activities not inimical to conservation could be allowed, while the other maintained that ‘inviolate’ meant free of humans and their activities; the Ministry of Environment and Forests appears to tacitly accept this latter, narrower definition.

The Joint Committee report also exposed a range of governance issues which stirred up a hornet’s nest. The Director General of Forests and the Central Unit of the Indian Forest Service Officers Association have cautioned that if the law is implemented as suggested by the report, it would lead to “a land scam of gargantuan proportions”, that local forest dwellers had no wherewithal to stand up to well-muscled external forces and emphasized that the integrity of the Forest Department officials ought not to be questioned. The successful fight by the Dongria Kondh tribals against one of the biggest corporations in the world over their sacred mountain, Niyamgiri, puts a lie to that belief. On the contrary, while the Karnataka State Forest Department has drawn up plans to move the Soligas out of the Biligiri Rangaswamy Temple Sanctuary, they confess helplessness in revoking the leases granted to large companies for 1800 acres of commercial coffee plantations smack inside the sanctuary!

In order to aid the states in identifying and creating Critical Wildlife Habitats, the Ministry of Environment and Forests had issued guidelines in October 2007 and when no further progress was made, revised them on 7 February 2011.

Although the Joint Committee rued the fact that the states were setting deadlines for the settlement of rights of forest people, often with an eye on upcoming elections, in reality no such deadline is set by law. Yet the Ministry’s new guidelines demand that states identify exclusive wildlife zones within three months. It would also like to extend these people-free zones to adjoining areas of protected forests although the FRA makes no such allowance. If any of the people living in the neighbourhood have to be moved, it is not clear which law governs their rights.

The guidelines further urge that local people be consulted, but that doesn’t mean an open discussion of the proposal. Instead, the forest dwellers will be told what is in store for them. While the FRA elevates local people to full-fledged partners in wildlife and forest management, the Ministry seeks to keep them under the thumb of the Forest Department.

To determine if people need to be shifted, two major criteria are outlined in the FRA – proof that local people are causing irreversible damage and are incapable of coexistence – but these make a mere guest appearance in Annexure 2 which deals with the financial outlay for rehabilitation of people. Why engage in the farce of determining if people have a negative impact on wildlife and if there was no scope for coexistence, when the decision to move people has already been made? The inescapable truth is that the guidelines are only concerned about identification and notification of the exclusive zones with the clear mandate to rid the area of people.

According to the FRA, the decision-making body is the gram sabha; the guidelines urge “even if only a few families” are willing to relocate, the proposal is to be submitted. One does wonder then how the mandatory consent of the gram sabha will be procured if only a few families agree. Divide and rule? Were these guidelines an attempt to restore powers to the Forest Department that had been taken away by the FRA? Was it a reaction to the devastating criticism by the Joint Committee? Has the FRA made any difference in forest governance and treatment of local people?

When protests hit the fan, the Minister for Environment and Forests issued a press statement “clarifying” the guidelines that only succeeded in confounding the problem further. Contradicting the guidelines, he says that these special wildlife zones will be declared only inside protected forests, not a squeak about the area “around” them. So what is a park manager to follow: the guidelines or the Minister’s communiqué?

The press statement then gets into a twist by suggesting that “consultations” meant “consent”. Consultation is a process of seeking opinion which could either lead to agreement or refusal. How could local people’s sentiments be taken for granted to assume that consultation was the same as assent?

In the meantime, the Planning Commission has slashed the budget for the National Tiger Conservation Authority by 25%, and it is likely that relocation of people from Tiger Reserves will be put on hold. This reprieve is the time to take stock of the next steps forward as there is no doubt that serious redressal is needed to bring policy in line with the laws. The promulgation of FRA promised a breath of fresh air: open and transparent decision-making. In its implementation, however, the heel of the Forest Department boot continues to squash the marginalized.

In this day and enlightened age, can we rightfully protect the tiger by impoverishing the people who have lived with it until now? Ironically, conservationists bemoan that the public is not more engaged with protecting wildlife and yet, they condone an undemocratic system that serves to turn any wildlife-tolerant tribal into an ardent opponent. Is it really so difficult to save the tiger without being unfair and callous to fellow human beings?

Alley cats

Published in DNA

Unedited version -

It seems like open season on leopards. Over the last month, leopards accused of attacking people in states as far apart as Haryana, Maharashtra and Orissa, have been killed by hysteric mobs.

On the afternoon of Dec 18, 2010, a leopard is said to have attacked three farmers in a village near Gurgaon, Haryana. Panicky villagers hammered it with iron rods and lathis and finally, one of them shot it dead.

Another midday drama unfolded on Jan 9, 2011 in the town of Karad, Maharashtra. A child is reported to have spotted a leopard sitting atop a house. When a crowd of people gathered, the cat snuck into an empty building. Instead of trapping it inside by barricading the doorway, the mob stoned it. With no secure place to hide, the cat charged out and in the ensuing melee, six people were injured. The police chased it with lathis and fired in the air. A man stepped out of a bar, collided with the fleeing leopard and down they went. A police official rushed forward and shot the leopard dead before the man was seriously injured.

A couple of days later, on Jan 13, 2011 a leopard was spotted in a forest plantation about 5 km from Bhubaneswar, Orissa. But before forest officials could arrive, a mob beat it to death reportedly instigated by a local television reporter who wanted dramatic visuals.

Conservationists have urged the National Board for Wildlife, the National Tiger Conservation Authority and the Ministry of Environment and Forests to take action against the people involved. But why do such incidents occur?

In virtually all the cases reported by the press, the leopards were provoked to attack; left alone, they would have quietly skulked away. But how does one prevent an excitable mob from harassing a cornered animal? Imposition of curfew until the animal is safely out of the way is one option. The other is for the Police and Forest Departments to start working in tandem. The former controls the crowd providing the space for the latter to either trap or tranquilize the animal. However, the local Forest Department outpost has to have the skilled personnel and appropriate tools handy for the success of such an operation.

Why do such situations arise in the first place? It is often surmised that leopards are “straying” into villages and towns because infrastructure projects such as dams and mines are depriving them of home and prey. To prevent more such tragic episodes from occurring, some activists have called for the restoration of connectivity between forest fragments and a stop to all further forest loss. While these are inherently sound conservation goals, the question is: can they prevent the collision between people and leopards?

In order to manage conflict, you need to know what is causing it. Fortunately, we’ve learned a few lessons from studies conducted by the leopard researcher, Vidya Athreya in the agricultural fields of Junnar and Akole districts in Maharashtra.

Contrary to widespread belief, here, where there is virtually no forest at all, it is not the absence of prey inside forests but the abundance of feral animals in the countryside that encourages leopards (and other carnivores such as wolves and hyenas) to live with humans. It is futile to manage leopards in this kind of landscape without first cleaning up the garbage, controlling the numbers of stray dogs and feral pigs and securing livestock in paddocks for the night (which the Akole people do and there is no conflict). Elsewhere, when villagers report that leopards are prowling through their fields, the Forest Department hauls the animals away to a forest. Randomly picking up big cats from villages and dropping them in forests actually causes a very real threat to human life.

In Junnar, in the early 2000s, when leopards that had not hurt anyone were preemptively captured and relocated, they began attacking people. We do not yet fully understand why a seemingly benign action should have such a dramatic consequence. Despite evidence, relocating leopards still remains the management tool of choice.

Forests are finite repositories of big cats. As juvenile leopards reach adulthood, these highly territorial animals need to find new land to claim as their own. It is only natural that they explore adjoining agricultural areas where there is food and shelter. If left unmolested, they may settle down to live with humans without causing a problem.

The irrigation projects of the mid 1980s changed cropping patterns in this part of Maharashtra; tall, dense sugarcane stands began to dominate the landscape. This is also the time when the locals say that leopards began to live amongst them. Yet, over the last twenty years, the people suffered little anxiety. Astonishingly, leopards are even hunting in Akole town because of the concentration of stray dogs and feral pigs. Studying situations such as this, we’ve learnt that leopards are quite at home in the absence of forest and wild prey. Further insights into the lives and needs of these cats that live with humans will enable better management of leopard-man conflict in the future.

The Mystery Civet

Published in New Indian Express Jan, 8, 2011

“The Malabar Civet may not even exist,” Divya Mudappa said softly, watching my face for a reaction. She didn’t mean that the creature had become extinct; she meant that such a species may have never existed. That’s an audacious statement to make but there are enough reasons to suspect that she might be right.

The Malabar Civet became known to science on the basis of a skin and a partly damaged skull donated by Lord Arthur Hay to the Asiatic Society of Bengal (ASB), Kolkata in 1845. The specimen tags say it came from South Malabar, Kerala, India, but whether the animal was captive or wild, hunted or traded and the exact location went unrecorded.

In 1874, Thomas Jerdon, a well-known figure in Indian natural history, writes that the Malabar Civet was very common and he had seen them on numerous occasions. He felt that the species ranged across the lowland coastal forests from Honavar in north Karnataka to Travancore (south Kerala) and perhaps even to Sri Lanka. This account formed the basis of all subsequent descriptions, range and status of the species by doyens such as Robert Sterndale (1884), William Blanford (1888), William Sclater (1891) and other naturalists until 2003. None of them ever saw the animal alive. In 1933 Pocock pointed out in his review of the species that Jerdon had probably mistaken the Small Indian Civet for the Malabar Civet! But by then, the latter was firmly established in the annals of Indian fauna.

Reginald Pocock, the famous mammalogist (1933), then suggested that the unique characters that set the Malabar Civet apart may be an artifact of captivity, but was nonetheless concerned by the rarity of the species.


In 1949, Angus Hutton reported seeing several Malabar Civets in the High Wavy Mountains, Tamil Nadu, where he was a tea planter. While he described these large civets to be fairly common in the evergreen forests, he had only seen one Small Indian Civet. The son of a civetone dealer based in Valparai, Hutton doesn’t mention how he distinguished the two species, but it is very likely that he misidentified the common Small Indian Civet as Jerdon had before him. What he called a Malabar Civet in a photograph was identified as a Small Indian Civet.

The first tangible evidence of the mysterious Malabar Civet popped up in 1987 when G.U. Kurup of the Zoological Survey of India, Kozhikode salvaged a skin from Elayur, about 25 km from his office. Another skin from the same source was lodged at the Calicut University museum while a third went missing. These skins apparently came from animals caught while a cashew plantation was being converted to rubber. Whether this was first hand information or hearsay is unknown.

A few years later, N.V.K. Ashraf procured an old stuffed specimen (the third one that went missing from Elayur in 1987?) and a fairly fresh skin from a tribal settlement in Poongode, about 15 km from Elayur. Both these specimens were given to the museum at the Wildlife Institute of India where they became decrepit and were subsequently dumped.

The Wildlife Trust of India conducted extensive camera trap surveys in the lowland forests of Karnataka and Kerala between 2006 and 2008 and found no sign of the animal. Concern for the civet grew.

Around this time, two specialists in nocturnal small mammals, R. Nandini and Divya Mudappa began reviewing all accounts of the species and examining museum specimens. They discovered that the little known information was based on Jerdon’s originally erroneous identification and the rest on surmise. This was the point at which Divya wondered if the species existed at all.

Then how does she account for the various skins found in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, I asked. Civetone, the musk produced by the anal glands of civet cats, was much sought after for perfumery, religious offerings and ayurvedic medicine over the millennia. In ancient times there was a thriving trade in large civet cats from Ethiopia and Southeast Asia. Kozhikode, in Kerala, was a major sea port and Kerala also appears to be the origin of all six museum specimens.

Civets in the trade were the African Civet, the Large-spotted Civet from Southeast Asia and the northern Large Indian Civet. The “Malabar Civet” skins bear an astonishing resemblance to the Large-spotted Civet, enough to confuse even seasoned biologists. It’s possible that some escaped captive Large-spotted Civets ended up in collections or they thrived in a small pocket, somewhere near Kozhikode.

This line of argument is sure to raise the hackles of some biologists. But consider this: if the animal was as common as reported in early literature, then why are only a few skins available in museums? It is possible that the Malabar Civet may be remarkably sensitive to habitat change, and hunting pressures. But civet cats in general are adaptable creatures that live on a varied diet. Misled by Jerdon, biologists have perhaps been looking for it in the wrong places. The lack of authentic information makes it difficult to get to the bottom of this conundrum.

So if you are out in the southern forests and see a large civet, these are the characters to look for: a black mane along the back from the nape to the tip of the tail, three dark stripes on the throat, the lack of a dark patch below the eye, and a broad, black tail tip. Even a bad picture would be better than no picture at all!

Creatures of a Lesser God

Published in the Financial Express 14 Nov 2010

Elephants and tigers, charismatic, sexy mega-mammals, are the mascots of wildlife conservation. Use them as umbrellas to protect a range of smaller less-popular species, said the wise ecologists. The amount of effort, publicity, concern (and millions of conservation dollars) elicited by these popular “umbrellas” is several orders of magnitude larger than any other creatures. We accept this inequality of the haves and have-nots just as easily as we accept it in human society. Today, however, in the grip of the tiger crisis, and with new research on a range of species from leopards to frogs, it appears as if the umbrella plan isn’t holding up. In some quarters, these are fighting words.

Take the long-snouted, fish-eating gharial. This crocodilian is extinct in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, and Myanmar and found only in India and Nepal where we are down to under 200 breeding adults. Put differently, there is no other large animal so close to extinction in India today! The gharial’s only hope of survival seems restricted to the Chambal and Girwa rivers. There is no mega mammalian umbrella here; the crisis is so dire that we urgently need to address the threats to this riverine species head on.
On the other hand, the wet forests of the Western Ghats and the Northeast were declared biodiversity hotspots not because of the relatively sparse mega-fauna but the numerous little creatures.  A myriad species of frogs, snakes and other small fry are found in isolated valleys and are not known to live anywhere else; extinctions are happening to life forms we haven’t even identified yet! The conservation of these “insignificant” creatures falls by the wayside when inordinate focus in placed on large mammals.

In practice umbrella conservation eventually focuses on just that species. For instance, long before the last tiger was poached in Sariska, the four-horned antelope had gone extinct in the Park. Although it was a prey species on which the tiger’s own existence hinged, this missing link in the food chain went completely unnoticed and un-mourned by most conservationists. Umbrella? Although the Tiger Task Force identified a whole range of systemic failures that led to the crisis, the presence of local people became an easy scapegoat for both government and conservationists. Despite the Supreme Court and Ministry of Environment and Forests directive, mines continue to operate around the Park with impunity. In addition to the message that local people are a disaster for wildlife, the fixation on large mammals whose survival is tied to tiny ‘protected’ forests jeopardizes conservation across the ‘unprotected’, greater part of the country.

These same “problematic” humans live with leopards far away from forests and sanctuaries, in the agricultural areas of Maharashtra. Not far from the Chambal, across the wetlands of Uttar Pradesh, the world’s tallest flying birds, the sarus crane, has survived alongside farmers for generations. Traditional agriculture has in fact benefitted a range of bird species such as jacanas, storks, shikras, egrets, herons, prinias, weaver birds, cisticolas and reptiles like monitor lizards, rat snakes and many more. All these ordinary farmers have been practicing conservationists while city slickers mainly preach, rant and rave. Here’s a conservation army to empower and enthuse, it’s time to look past the gates of sanctuaries and national parks and mega-mammals. And this is where the future of much of our biodiversity lies.

Satish “Batagur” Bhaskar

By Rom Whitaker (as narrated to Janaki Lenin)

Published in Indian Ocean Turtle Newsletter 24, July 2010

In the early ‘70s the Madras Snake Park became a local hangout for young folks from nearby campuses like Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), AC College of Architecture and Madras Christian College. Thirty years later I run into some of these guys, sometimes in strange places. They're now mostly as paunchy and balding as I am and we trade a few stories and get into laughing fits over “the good old days”.

One of the characters who showed up back then was a soft-spoken engineering student named Satish Bhaskar. He was a teetotaling non-smoker, a real ascetic compared to the rest of us. His passion was the sea, and he spent more time swimming than in the IIT classroom. It’s not for nothing that his hostel mates called him Aquaman (privately)!

I was concentrating on crocs at the time, and whenever I could get away from Snake Park it was to survey gharial, mugger and saltwater crocodile habitat across India. At the same time, we also wanted to know sea turtle status: which species come to Indian shores, where, when and in what numbers. So, we really needed a full time sea turtle man.

Opportunely (for the turtles), Satish was getting disenchanted with his IIT course (after finishing most of it) and yearned to be a field man with a mission. The Snake Park had a tiny research budget, but it was enough to hire Satish as Field Officer (Rs. 250 a month, approx. US$ 28 based on exchange rates of that time) and get him out on his first few survey trips. When the fledgling WWF-India saw the good work he was doing for endangered sea turtles, Satish landed his first grant which really set him in motion.

About this time, the Madras Crocodile Bank was being born and Satish was its first resident. He helped to build the place (in between the sea turtle trips) but funds were so tight and sporadic that there were times when he had no work. So what did he do? He kept in shape by filling a bag of sand, carrying it to the other end of the Croc Bank, dumping it and starting again! Villagers still remember Satish hoisting a 50 kg sack of cement over his shoulder casually as if it were no more than a sleeping bag. This was the training that made him so tough in the field; it enabled him to walk most of India’s entire coastline, more than 4,000 km, over the next few years looking for sea turtles, their tracks and nests! He loved going to remote places which few Indians have the stamina or stomach for. “To him, swimming in shark infested waters was the most normal thing to do,” declares Shekar Dattatri, who has known him since the early Snake Park days.

Old Jungle Saying: Satish is incredibly kind to people. If he has anything that someone wants, he gives it away.

In 1977, Satish conducted the first surveys in Lakshadweep and zeroed in on an uninhabited island, Suheli Valiyakara, as the place for a focused green sea turtle study. The only problem was that the main nesting period is during the monsoon and no one goes there when the sea is so rough. In 1982, Satish left his young wife and three month old daughter, Nyla to maroon himself on Suheli for the whole monsoon, from May to September. It meant making elaborate preparations, like calculating the amount of food he would need. We sat with Satish and talked about things that could go wrong during this isolation – chronic toothache, appendicitis, malaria were just a few sobering thoughts. The Coast Guard provided some signal flares and there was talk of a two-way radio but eventually Satish just set sail and that’s the last we heard of him till September.

Actually that’s not true. A few months later, his wife Brenda back in Madras, received a loving letter from him. He had launched his message in a bottle on July 3rd and 24 days and more than 800 km later it was picked up by a Sri Lankan fisherman, Anthony Damacious, who very kindly posted it to Brenda along with a covering letter, a family picture and an invitation to visit him in Sri Lanka. The ‘bottle post’ was very romantic, but of course Satish’s spin was that he was trying to see if he could study ocean currents using this technique!

An emergency situation did arise on the deserted isle, and one that none of us could have predicted: a huge dead whale shark washed up on Satish’s little island and started rotting. The nauseous stench became so overpowering that our intrepid sea turtle man had to move to the extreme other end of the tiny island to a somewhat precarious, wave lashed spit of sand.

That year the monsoon abated late. So though Satish was packed and ready to go home by September 1st, (after 3 ½ months with only turtles and a radio for company), the relief boat from Kavaratti Island, over 60 km away did not arrive. Satish had run out of rations and legend has it that he survived on milk powder, turtle eggs, clams and coconuts for weeks. Fortunately, the lighthouse on neighbouring Suheli Cheriyakara needed servicing and a Lighthouse Department ship, the MV Sagardeep, arrived on October 11th. As Satish clambered aboard, Capt. Kulsreshta's first words were, "Take him to the galley!"

For a person with a gargantuan appetite, Satish could live on very little. On a trip to the Nicobars, Indraneil Das and he ran out of rations and water and they still had a day’s walk ahead of them. The former was half-dead when they ran into a party of Nicobarese who tried to feed them but Satish politely and firmly declined saying they had just eaten and didn’t allow Neil to eat either. Later he pointed that they had nothing to repay the poor people’s kindness! (This trip yielded five new species – two frogs, two lizards and a snake.)

On another occasion, on Little Andaman, Satish had again run out of rations and was surviving on “only biscuits and vitamins for 4 days.” He came upon an empty Onge tribal camp with some freshly barbecued turtle meat. He took some of the meat and left two biscuit packets in exchange mainly to avoid a spear through his back! Just counting the number of times he ran out of food in remote areas, we suspect that he deliberately starved himself to see how far he could take it.

Old Jungle Saying: Satish always travels with a kerosene stove and a pressure cooker. The former is to avoid burning wood as it is bad for the environment and the latter for cooking efficiency. He also carries an automobile inner tube to raft his supplies from canoe to shore and vice versa.

Through the 1980s, again thanks to WWF and other funds, Satish visited many of the islands of the Andamans. His were the first recommendations on sea turtle nesting beach protection. These helped give the Andaman and Nicobar Islands Forest Department a solid conservation basis to resist the efforts of big business and other Government Department interests in “developing” beaches for tourism.

Amongst all this serious work, he had time for research of another kind. Writing in Hamadryad, the Croc Bank Newsletter, he wonders if the sea krait was attracted to light, feigns dismay that this may be true and proceeds to try to make one climb his leg by playing with his torchlight!

By this time, Satish’s work was being appreciated by sea turtle biologists worldwide. Papers on the species inhabiting this region were very scarce indeed and his publications helped to fill that big gap. In 1979 Satish was invited to give a paper on the status of sea turtles of the eastern Indian Ocean at the World Conference on Sea Turtle Conservation, in Washington D.C. In recognition for his contributions to sea turtle conservation, Satish received a fancy watch and award from Rolex in 1984.

When Ed Moll came to India to do a freshwater turtle study, Satish became a key collaborator. He surveyed extensively for a highly endangered Batagur baska which nests on coastal beaches along with olive ridleys. Sadly the Bengalis have eaten the terrapin to near extinction and there are no known wild nests in India. It was at this time that he was nicknamed “Batagur Bhaskar”.

Old Jungle Saying: Satish has no sense of direction. He gets lost easily.

He spent many months, over several years, studying the hawksbill and green turtle nesting biology on tiny South Reef Island on the west coast of North Andaman. He described this island as “one of ten sites most favoured by nesting [g]reen turtles in India”. Saw Bonny, a Forest Department Range Officer stationed on Interview Island, regularly risked his life ferrying supplies to Satish on South Reef Island, even during stormy monsoon weather. Bonny deputed a department staff member from his camp to assist Satish who was working alone. Emoye spent a few days on South Reef, got fed up and wanted to return. Since the currents were strong and Satish was an accomplished swimmer, Emoye requested him to go along with him.

Over the years shark fishermen regularly hauled in sharks from this very channel. The sea was rough, it was after all the monsoon season. Being a modest and understated narrator, Satish rated his swimming skills as “below par” and claimed that his snorkeling flippers gave him confidence. To keep warm during the more than two kilometre swim, he wore two shirts. Emoye rested frequently on Satish to catch his breath and together the two of them swam across the channel.

A party of shark fishermen were camped on the beach in Interview when our intrepid swimmers landed. One of them remembered meeting Satish earlier and enquired, "Still loafing around? Still jobless?" He thought Satish was an ambergris-hunter. It was already dark when Satish and Emoye set out across the island to the forest camp. Half way, a bull elephant in musth trumpeted his warning from just 30 metres away and started to chase them. The two men ran for their lives. Later Satish would recount, “I had done some distance running in college but the penalty for losing was never as dire.” Already exhausted from their long and arduous swim, they couldn’t continue running and the elephant showed no signs of relenting. Remembering a Kenneth Anderson story, Satish threw his shirt down while continuing to run and was gratified to hear the pachyderm squealing with rage moments later. With the animal distracted, the men could finally stumble onwards to the forest camp. They made a pact – if the shirt was intact, it was Emoye’s; if not, then Satish’s. The next morning they found the shirt in three pieces completely smeared with muddy elephant footprints, while one bit had to be recovered from a tree. He later posted the pieces back to Brenda with a reassuring note.

Old Jungle Saying: Satish trusts people implicitly and they, in turn, don’t let him down.

In the mid 1980’s WWF-Indonesia contracted Satish to study the huge, intensely exploited leatherback sea turtle rookeries on the beaches of the Vogelkopf, the western most peninsula of the island of New Guinea, in Irian Jaya. This was a logistically tough place to work. First of all, there was no access from the landward side and one couldn’t even land a boat on the beach. This was why it had remained protected for so long. Then the people from neighbouring areas started taking tens of thousands of leatherback eggs. People swam ashore with jerry cans and sacks and floated the eggs back to boats.

However, Satish found a way to keep in touch. He would swim 100 m out to a passing longboat that was headed to Sorong, and hand his letters to someone on board with enough currency for stamps. There was one boat every 20 to 30 days. By late Aug 1985, he had tagged about 700 leatherbacks almost single-handedly.

Rather uncharacteristically, Satish never wrote up his report for WWF-Indonesia. I have no explanation why this happened nor did we ever discuss this. After a year had passed and there was no sign of the report, I was embarrassed as I had recommended him for the job. The document was sorely needed to put some laws in place very soon. I had my sense of justice as well so I wrote the report in his name.

Sadly, the 13,360 nests that he recorded in 1984 was probably the highest ever in recent years. Ever since then, the average number of nests has hovered way down around 3200. And this has resulted in yet another ‘Satish myth’ – the local people believe that Satish tagged the female leatherbacks with metal tags, and using a giant magnet drew all the turtles to his country! The local elders have refused to permit any more tagging of turtles on this beach.

Old Jungle Saying: He doesn’t like to crawl into a sleeping bag on cold nights; instead he wears all his clothes. Sometimes, he buries himself, except his face which is covered by a mosquito net, in the sand to get away from inquisitive island rats, mosquitoes and sand flies at night. He usually sleeps out of sight of others at camp, after playing a few riffs on his harmonica.

In 1993, while chugging past Flat Island, a small spit of land off the west coast of the Jarawa Tribal Reserve in the Andamans, Satish and his companions saw a pair of human footprints emerging from the sea and disappearing into the vegetation. Satish had evaluated this island as a prime green turtle nesting beach, and despite the others cautioning him of Jarawas (the hostile tribe who routinely finished off trespassers with arrows), Satish swam ashore. His companions watched in horror as he followed the footprints into the forest. While his friends feared the worst, he emerged from another side crouching behind a green turtle carapace, holding it like a shield. The fearsome tribals never showed themselves and Satish returned safely.

On a subsequent trip, some Jarawa came aboard the canoe. Satish later recalled admiringly that the Jarawa were powerful swimmers and he had been very impressed by the bow-wake their breast-stroke created. Everyone else cowered in the back while Satish calmly interacted with the tribals. The crew had already hidden the machetes and other metal objects that the Jarawa coveted for making arrow heads. Eventually the tribals left without harming anybody but did take some spoons.

Old Jungle Saying: Satish likes to catch everything.

Local intelligence was that the Galathea river, Great Nicobar, had a lot of crocodiles. After dark one night standing on the bridge spanning the river, Satish played his torch over the water. Suddenly his flashlight caught some small eye shines along the waters’ edge and he got very excited thinking they were baby salt water crocs. So he crept down to the edge of the river to catch them, but they turned out to be large spiders!

But he did encounter crocodiles. Once while lying asleep on a beach on Trinkat Island, Nicobars, he woke up to a rustling noise. He found a young croc looking at him through the mosquito net. In mock seriousness he later wrote, “I’m overlooking it this time but if the crocs that wake me get any bigger I’m headed back to Madras.”

The Karen of the Andamans are particularly fond of Satish. He earned their respect by treating young and old with courtesy and respect, and also with such exploits as swimming from Wandoor in Middle Andaman to Grub Island (a distance of about 1.6 km) and back, walking the entire coastline of Little Andaman even crossing swift streams such as Bumila and Jackson Creeks and doggedly surveying beaches no matter how big the obstacles. But that didn’t stop the Karen from teasingly nicknaming Satish, Cheto (Karen for ‘basket’, as it rhymes with Bhaskar!). Several older Nicobarese remember “the man who came looking for turtles” even today, many years after his last visit. He was perhaps the only man to ever find a reticulated python on the tiny island of Meroe (between Little Nicobar and Nancowry). The Nicobarese, who frequent the island, had never seen this species there before and were duly impressed. This python was later handed over to the Forest Department in Port Blair.

Satish notched identification marks on the carapaces of turtles that came ashore to lay eggs. Later, a bunch of titanium tags was sent by the Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service for tagging hawksbills on South Reef. In Vogelkopf, he tagged more than 700 leatherback turtles. There is no information on tag returns from any of these turtles. One reason may be that subsequent night surveys (after Satish left) were inconsistent on Andamans, Nicobars and Irian Jaya. Secondly, the English lettering which provides the return address means little to local people. Karen tribals have mentioned finding tags on turtles they ate but not knowing the significance of the metal, simply threw it away into the bush.

For not being a religious person at all, he has the morals of one. He doesn’t like anyone to tell him what to do, which made my job as boss difficult. (But he was conscientious about sending reports so he didn’t need to be reminded.) I clearly remember once when I suggested that he store his things in a tin trunk as they were being destroyed by termites, he took umbrage. “Would I tell you what to do, Rom?” he asked in his low pitched gruff voice with a touch of menace. I never made that mistake again! He is a perfectionist - wanting to do everything right and better than anybody else. He also has an exaggerated sense of justice – always rooting for the downtrodden (probably why he got along well with tribals, villagers and field people). In many ways, he is very un-Indian.

Old Jungle Saying: Nothing is useless; anything “useless” was just something for which Satish hasn't yet found a use.

Once while running to catch a bus to Mayabunder, his chappal broke. On being asked if he’d like to buy a new pair, he responded, "Only one broke - surely another one will wash up with the high tide". He tried very hard to keep South Reef clean of trash. On one occasion, he arrived in Madras with two sacks stuffed with rubber chappals that had washed ashore on the island. Legend has it that he took it to the recyclers.

After twenty years of doing some of the first baseline sea turtle surveys in the country, Satish retired to spend more time with his family. Soon thereafter, an UNDP (United Nations Development Program) - Wildlife Institute of India project did a more extensive survey of turtle nesting beaches. But since then, the 2004 tsunami has changed the profile of many Andaman and Nicobar beaches and we don’t yet know where new beaches are forming, or how the turtles have responded to this change. We desperately need a new Satish Bhaskar to continue the work.

Satish now lives in Goa with his wife Brenda (who was by the way, the Snake Park and Croc Bank’s secretary for many years!) and their three children (Nyla, Kyle and Sandhya). Satish is the man who kicked sea turtle conservation in India into high gear. There’s a strong lesson in all this and an inspiration to young naturalists who wonder, “What can I do to help?” Satish’s single-minded quest for sea turtles in his quiet, often unorthodox way, set the stage for the major conservation efforts being made today. Here’s a prime example of how one person’s passion for an animal and its habitat can help make the difference between survival and extinction.

Inputs from Aaron Savio Lobo, Allen Vaughan, Arjun Sivasundar, Atma Reddy, Manish Chandi, Manjula Tiwari, K. Munnuswamy, Nina and Ram Menon, Shekar Dattatri are gratefully acknowledged.


Also see an introduction by Kartik Shanker and a list of Satish Bhaskar's publications.

Book Review: Conservation at the Crossroads

Published in Seminar Sept 2010


CONSERVATION AT THE CROSSROADS: Science, Society, and the Future of India’s Wildlife by Ghazala Shahabuddin. Permanent Black, Ranikhet, 2010, pp.288, Rs.595 .

In the increasingly polarized field of conservation in India, Shahabuddin’s writings tend to be inclusive and moderate, and this work is no exception. On the one hand is the include-people lobby that believes that local inhabitants can sustainably utilize forest resources, while on the other is the exclude-people lobby that promotes the relocation of people from forests. Which of these two approaches conserves optimum biodiversity? Can these contradictory positions be reconciled or are they mutually exclusive? These are the questions that face wildlife conservation today and now finally there is a book that explores these two major pathways over eight chapters. Shahabuddin is no stranger to these issues as she has co-edited an anthology of essays in a book, Making Conservation Work in 2007 and is Associate Professor at the School of Human Ecology, B.R. Ambedkar University, Delhi.

The total protection formula focuses on the Forest Department excluding people from forests by removing villages from protected areas, policing the area from all use, and restricting access to researchers. The community conservation strategy comes in a couple of forms such as Community Conservation Areas, Joint Forestry Management (JFM), and the World Bank funded India Ecodevelopment Project (IEDP). These have been implemented in various parts of India under diverse conditions. Critical to evaluating these management strategies is the independent researcher, who is frequently accorded step-child treatment by the Forest Department, thereby depriving itself of valuable insights in forest governance.

Despite “total protection” being the state’s forest management policy, Shahabuddin chronicles the widespread habitat degradation in India’s protected areas. Infrastructure projects such as roads, dams, and mines, as well as harvesting of forest products by a growing human population both within and without these forests have taken their toll. Using Sariska as an example, the author examines the deficiency in policy and governance. Prior to the tiger crisis, researchers had reported the extinction of the chinkara and the four-horned antelope, vital prey species of the tiger. It was also known that the habitat was degraded because of firewood and fodder collection, and grazing. By 1990, tree regeneration had already been severely hit, with growth stunted across the ecosystems, the diversity of species was plummeting and exotic invasive plants had made inroads. It was just a matter of time before the tiger disappeared.

On the other hand, the department kowtowed to powerful forces that had interests in mining and timber. The park is so small that the dynamite blasts in the mines on its doorstep can even be heard in the core area now. Despite these larger threats from outside the reserve, when the tiger crisis erupted, blame was pinned on the soft targets, local people. While little has been done to improve and secure the habitat, the entire focus of the remedial measures is on moving local people out and introducing tigers into Sariska.

At the other end of the spectrum, the pro-people lobby holds that the pristine nature model is a failure and promotes a more inclusive style of conservation. The community conservation paradigm co-opts local people as custodians of the forests who are also allowed to use it sustainably. However, some crucial questions remain unanswered. How much can be harvested without affecting the future regeneration of a species? Does extraction of such products negatively impact the ecosystem?
Collection of fruits, flowers, and seeds by people deprive birds and mammals of a plentiful seasonal resource. Dead wood collection may negatively impact hole-nesting birds. Shahabuddin rightly notes that few studies monitor extraction and evaluate its impact on the ecosystem. Since most Non-Timber Forest Produce (NTFP) are destined for markets, these tend to change the diversity of the forest until either the resource is over-exploited or the marketable species is selectively nurtured to the detriment of all others. In forests used by people, the species that fare the worst are the ones that are sensitive to habitat change and disturbance. In almost every case, livelihood concerns triumphed over the conservation agenda. Even in flagship projects such as the Annapurna Conservation Area Project in Nepal, biodiversity and degradation worries remain unaddressed.

Joint Forestry Management (JFM) was one of the largest exercises in the decentralization of natural resource management in India. Although “joint” is the operative word, in a majority of the cases decision-making powers were firmly in the hands of the department, with little or no involvement of the villagers. In many cases the benefit sharing agreements were not in place, so although villagers provided labour with the expectation of some returns, these did not materialize. For these reasons, people were suspicious of the department’s intentions; but on the positive side, JFM projects did succeed in providing a source of firewood and fodder by regenerating large areas of degraded landscapes.

The aim of the IEDP was to provide greater synergy between protected areas (and their custodians) and local people for biodiversity conservation. While the poorest people were the most dependent on forest resources, they were effectively sidelined from deriving any benefits from the project as they couldn’t afford the mandatory financial contribution. Conservationists felt that such projects were detrimental to conservation as it led to unnecessary infrastructure development within a protected area causing degradation, while overburdening the officials already charged with protection. Like the JFM projects, there was no consultation with the local people and this appears to be the crucial factor. Periyar and Kalakkad-Mundanthurai Tiger Reserves are celebrated success stories because they delegated decision making powers to villagers.

Did these community conservation programs promote biodiversity conservation? Definitely not, is the author’s resounding answer. The include-people champions say that the key to the success of any community conservation measure is security of land tenure. But, with an increasing human population, the corresponding demand for agricultural land and finite forest resources, can forest ownership alone drive sustainability, asks the author. While she agrees that land tenure has to be secure, she also adds that extractive pressure should be low, and access rights clearly-defined if effective conservation is to be practiced. How is it going to be possible to keep the extraction pressure low when there is no sign of the human population growth rate leveling off? Nevertheless, there is an incentive to support this paradigm as local livelihoods are entwined with the ecological services of a rich forest.

Shahabuddin also turns her attention to the state’s discouragement of scientific endeavour in this field. The Indian government took a conscious decision to exclude US funds and researchers from India and effectively stunted its progress in ecological research. Although the Indian economy has been liberalized, the Forest Department continues to perpetrate a Permit Raj. The department’s combative attitude to researchers is captured succinctly by the author, “It is as if science-based perspectives are viewed as a mortal threat by a forest department that believes it has a monopoly on knowledge of the forest.”

The title of the book begs the initial question whether conservation was ever on a straight path, when it appears to have staked a permanent spot at the crossroads. Towards the end, Shahabuddin reconciles that these are not mutually exclusive pathways, when the choice is restricted to only one of two directions. There is clearly no alternative to well-governed inviolate areas for ecosystem conservation. Community-inclusive strategies are complementary to total protection and both need to be treated on par if conservation goals are to be achieved. These are but many stairways to one goal.

The forest department is perhaps the single largest landowner in the country governing over 635,000 sq.km., and no large scale conservation initiative takes place without its approval. In case after case, the author concludes that the failure, or at least the limited success, of almost every conservation program in the country comes down to the department’s refusal to share decision-making powers with local people. (Indeed, a more appropriate title for the book would have been ‘Conservation at a Roadblock’!) The department does not appear to realize that for conservation initiatives to work, local people have to be made equal partners or that independent researchers are essential to evaluate the sustainability of harvests, and benefits to biodiversity conservation and livelihoods. Given the entrenched hegemonic power structure that dictates conservation policy and implementation today, the system does not have the capacity to engage with local people with trust, empathy and respect which predisposes these various strategies to failure. While the author hints at this institutional failure, she misses an opportunity to make a hard case for change within the department.

I do have a few other quibbles; the work suffers from a lack of editorial oversight. There are repetitions, inconsistencies, language issues, use of local names for tree species and tangents that could have been avoided and made this the high quality publication that it deserves to be. However, I recommend this book highly to anyone who is perplexed by the cacophony of voices evangelizing one or the other paradigm. As for the ones deeply rooted in their include-or-exclude people positions, they might find critical evaluations of their ideology and some common grounds for agreement with the opposite camp. The more consensus there is, the stronger conservation actions will be.

Narcondam - “Pit of Hell”

The full version

Published in July 2010, Outlook Traveller

At daybreak, the ‘Pit of Hell’ emerged hazily from the horizon like a mirage. We had spent almost 24 hours fighting the wind across the Andaman Sea and for much of that time, totally out of sight of land. Four hours later, we reached the end of our almost 260 km voyage from Port Blair. We anchored off the north-eastern shore at Police Post Bay so-called for one of the remotest camps of any police force in the world. Inexplicably the ancient Portuguese called it “Barata (Cockroach) Bay”! It is also probably one of the few outposts that has no civilians in its precincts and consequently, an enviable nil crime rate. A group of paramilitary police of the Indian Reserve Battalion safeguard India’s claim to the most isolated island of the entire Andaman group. It seemed like a paid, policeman’s holiday but as we found out later, these brave-hearts marooned in the “pit of hell” were homesick and afraid of the wild jungle.

Police Post Bay

There was no idyllic sandy beach but the island had all the other hallmarks of an earthly paradise: a picturesque, densely forested hill looming 710 m out of the deep blue sea. So why the contrarian name: Narak-kund (Sanskrit for ‘pit of hell’)? Popular theory says that perhaps ancient Indian cartographers christened India’s only volcano (now drily and unimaginatively called Barren Island) as an infernal sink. But over time (as early as the year 1701), the larger, extinct volcano lying 150 km northeast of the rightful-owner of the name became known as Narcondam. It’s worth remarking that none of the other islands in the Andaman group were named by Indians. If a foolhardy crow was to fly from Port Blair to Rangoon (Burma), he’d spy verdant Narcondam along the way, about 114 km east of North Andaman.

A male Narcondam hornbill

About six months after the tsunami of 2004, Narcondam reportedly lived up to its name by spewing mud and smoke. This sudden activity in a volcano that last erupted more than 12,000 years ago ought to have made front page news (but didn’t). However, the news sang through the internet frequencies exciting volcano spotters around the world. Some speculated that the massive earthquake may have set off some magma movement under the tectonic plates. Eventually geologists at the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, reported that it was a damp squib: clouds of dust caused by a landslide had given the impression of an eruption. This did little to convince the police personnel who were evacuated and the outpost abandoned for eighteen months. Nonetheless, there was still a shred of doubt: we wanted to be certain that India had only one active volcano.

For the following three days, we were to live aboard the 48 foot yacht, the Emerald Blue, and commute to shore in an inflatable dinghy. April, with its calm waves before the monsoonal currents set in, was one of the best months to land. Narcondam is a 1700 metre high, solitary oceanic mountain, of which more than 1000 metres lies below the surface of the sea. There were hardly any shallows and landing was tricky; the dinghy would have to surf onto a small ledge on the slope. Amongst the smooth round andesite boulders (of volcanic origin) bordering the shoreline, was a tiny little sandy beach with conveniently just enough space for all of us to make a quick jump into knee deep water before the next wave came crashing in.

Eight of us, with an interest in wildlife and wild places, were crammed on board the Emerald Blue for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. While an extensive list of birds seen on Narcondam had been compiled by previous teams of birders, little was known about the rest of the animal and plant kingdom. Members of the team now hoped to add to that sparse information.

A recent birdwatchers’ newsletter had raised concerns about goats over-running the island. Since the 1500s it was a common mariners’ practice to drop off livestock such as goats, pigs, chickens and even giant tortoises on islands as nourishment for shipwrecked mariners. Indeed Alexander Selkirk, the prototype Robinson Crusoe, survived four years as a castaway on one of the Juan Fernández islands, off Chile on such feral goats. Narcondam was no exception: in 1899 A.O. Hume quoted Robert Tytler saying that “pigs, goats and fowls” had been released there. We don’t know if these were eaten up by unfortunate sailors or whether they eventually died out, but in 1976, the Indian Police brought two pairs of goats to keep their personnel stationed on the island well-stocked with animal protein. Perhaps the men got sick of eating mutton every day, because, by 1998, there were 400 of the voracious caprines rapidly eating their way through the native island vegetation.

Ornithologists lobbied for the removal of these animals, going so far as to argue that the island was being held together by tree roots and implying that should forest regeneration be adversely affected then not only the hornbill population but the whole island could collapse. Their worries were not misplaced, as one other iconic island bird, the dodo, was driven to extinction by introduced pigs, monkeys and carnivorous men a couple of centuries earlier on Mauritius. Although the Narcondam hornbill isn’t nearly as harried, the tiny size of its island home (7 sq.km.) severely handicaps its ability to survive any threat. So checking on the goats was high on our agenda.

A giant fig tree

Around the police camp were extensive coconut, banana and areca plantations (in 1916, this area was recognized by its groves of Burmese fishtail palms) and the place reeked of human feces. A yearling water monitor lizard and a gorgeous brilliant green Andaman day-gecko watched us from the safety of trees. Koel calls rang through the forest. In the absence of crows, whose nests would they parasitize? Pigeons, replied Divya Mudappa.

The force of the monsoonal stream had sliced through the embankments of a dry streambed as neatly as a knife through butter-fruit. The vertical walls of boulders were held in place by roots of trees. Still, a pipeline carrying water from a tiny perennial waterfall further upstream to the police camp had to be protected from rolling rocks dislodged by heavy rains and frequent earthquakes. Indeed in several locations, mangled lengths of pipes lay twisted and trapped under piles of debris.

The air was still and very humid; a hill myna high up in the canopy prattled away until silenced by the wild shrieking of a juvenile white-bellied sea eagle being mobbed by two pairs of squawking Narcondam hornbills. It was their nesting season, and predatory raptors were not welcome in the immediate air space. Further up the wash, the boulders below a huge tree were splattered with little brown scat-spots, telltale evidence of a nest directly above our heads. Soon the parents returned after seeing off the eagle, victoriously chuckling to one another. This was our first good look at this charismatic species: the father was a handsome honey-brown fellow while the female was an ordinary black. Since their enormous yellowish-red beaks were in the way, they had to tilt their heads comically sideways in order to see us. By counting the rings on the casque above the beak, we could tell the male was six years old. Disgusted by our presence, they took off screaming invectives.

Kalyan Varma urgently beckoned us over and pointed to a rusty brown bird lurking in the undergrowth. It was a slaty-legged crake, a species not recorded in the Andaman Islands before. Kalyan had been washing his face by the pool when he felt something pecking the Velcro on his footwear. It’s hard to tell whether the crake was mystified by the man or his Tevas. In an ironic situation for a photographer, the bird was much too close to his long lens for a picture!

The hornbills would have been similarly trusting of the first humans they had ever met. Indeed in 1898, the commanding officer of the ‘Elphinstone’, Lt. J.H. St. John, had observed that the birds were tame. But in the intervening century, they had been shot for museum specimens by visiting ornithologists as well as for the pot by the police force, so sadly the hornbills have become fearful of humans, just like any mainland animal. Not only the birds, St. John says even water monitors were as “tame as pet mice and one climbed into the lap of the Chief Commissioner’s niece and seemed to be quite at home.” Needless to say, these lizards were now scarce (apparently hunted by the resident humans) and the few big ones that we encountered went crashing into the undergrowth. The only trusting animals were the numerous skinks who investigated the falling crumbs from our mid-day snacks.

A young water monitor lizard

The forest undergrowth wilted in the heat, reflecting our state of being too. The resin (dhup) of the huge Canarium trees remained uncollected, unlike other islands where it is intensively harvested. At a tiny little beach, we spotted a hornbill chick in a nest hole high up on a tall, straight-boled Tetrameles tree. While the rest decided to get pictures of the parents feeding the little one, a couple of us set out for the lighthouse on the northwest tip of the island. It was a steep climb. The reward for climbing to the top was a spectacular view of Pigeon Island surrounded by an indigo blue sea.

Pigeon Island

Back at the boat, all of us jumped in the water to cool off after the long sweaty day. In the distance we could hear the hornbills squawking, there was a freshly caught snapper frying in the galley and we had the rare privilege of being in one of the most spectacular and isolated spots in the world. Narcondam, the hell-hole? No way! More appropriate would be Swargam, the heavenly abode! The only fine print is that the sun rises at an ungodly 5 am in this paradise (you can blame the westerly Indian Standard Time line).

Very early one morning, we set sail for the west coast. My main goal was to climb the summit, and we hoped to follow the detailed route mentioned in the latest edition (2009/2010) of the Southeast Asia Pilot (the Andaman section appears to have been written by two British nationals and it would be interesting to know how they got permission to go ashore). The estimated duration of ascent was three hours for the “reasonably fit and agile,” and descent was likely to take another two hours. It sounded like it could be done all in a day’s walk but much depended on our ability to land. That morning, the currents were strong and the waves crashed roughly over the rocky beach which was the designated starting point. Nick Band, the captain, made a quick reconnaissance and the prognosis was grim: landing there was a definite recipe for broken legs. Plan B was to attempt an ascent from the hornbill-nest beach on the north coast of Narcondam.

We managed to land but not without getting soaked by the turbulent waves. Within a few paces of starting up the hill slope, we were startled to see a trail. Goats? Rom Whitaker however, noticed the path leading into the roots of a tree. Any goat would have to be a midget to crawl into that tiny space; it could only have been a rat trail. The climb became steadily steeper and more difficult to negotiate with fallen rotting logs blocking the path. Marveling at the massive dhup trees that rose high and lofty as rockets and their fin-like buttresses provided a welcome break from the arduous climb. It was tempting to think that no human had climbed this ridge but in this increasingly explored world, one cannot say that with any certainty.

A giant dhup tree

Half way up a steep climb, an exhausted Rom copped out. He promised to wait but knowing him too well, he’d be off either looking for lizards in the luxuriant valley below or heading back to the beach. There was precious little by way of birds or animals on this climb to keep a bored human entertained. Neither were any hornbills visible nor the fig trees that sustained them. It became steeper and more slippery; dislodged rocks rolled perilously downhill barely missing people behind, and like gibbons we used our arms to take our weight as footholds couldn’t be trusted.

A cool breeze blowing gently off the sea invigorated our catch-our-breath stops. Four hours from the starting point, we reached the top of a 430 m hill, but the summit of Narcondam still towered over us. Several humans had left evidence of their presence here by gouging their names on trees; the culprits must have come from the police camp which was at the foot of the hill on the eastern side. To reach the tallest peak we would have to descend at least 100 m to a valley and then climb another 400 m. Shankar Raman declared, “It would just take 2000 paces to climb that hill”. It seemed so simple, but there wasn’t enough time to do it and camping up there was out of the question. The vegetation at the higher elevations looked denser than the deciduous forest we had just climbed and therefore the going would be slower. (The thickly forested summit also bore testament to the fact that Narcondam hadn’t recently aspired for active volcano-hood.) We could descend to the police camp directly, but we were committed to returning the way we came as we had left Rom behind.

After a half hour rest, our clothes were still wet with sweat, but we decided to make a move. I was also beginning to worry about Rom; I saw visions of him lying unconscious or in pain with a broken leg. The descent was even more slippery than the ascent. We tried to climb down gingerly without dislodging any rocks but a few did escape. Like lumberjacks, we hollered down to the people ahead, “Rock!” but with the slope being so steep there was little they could do to get out of the way in time. Fortunately the rocks missed them; but once, Naveen actually jumped up in the air acrobatically to avoid being hit by a tumbling boulder. Quickly we learnt to wait till the others were behind a tree before sliding down a tricky incline. I imagined that Rom was probably asleep under a tree way down below, unaware of the rocks we were dislodging and perhaps one would hit his head. My disquiet grew worse; I refused to let anyone take any breaks, and I set a punishing rhythm.

A couple of hours later, we arrived exhausted at the beach to find Rom fully stretched out having a snooze to the soothing rhythm of the crashing waves. Apparently he had tacked a note for us on the tree where we had parted, but since we couldn’t remember the spot and being in a hurry, we never saw it. (If any of you find it, please mail it to me.)

Back at the police camp, we chatted about life on the island. They complained about hordes of rats that destroyed everything. We had caught glimpses of the rodents scurrying around in the trees near the plantations. Could they have jumped ship and colonized the island? In 1893, Major David Prain noted that “a rat swarms everywhere” and was the commonest mammal on the island. A decade ago we had experienced a similar situation on South Sentinel Island, another remote island almost 400 km in a straight line to the southwest, so perhaps it was normal for such a high density of rats to live on these isolated islands. Or maybe some early ship seeded these islands with rats as a surer food source than goats and pigs! Of goats, we had seen nary a sign; no pellets or tracks. Thankfully, besides a pair seen by a few police personnel just the previous week, an almost thorough removal had been executed.

On our last night we feasted on king mackerel seviche. Rom bemoaned that he hadn’t been able to see Narcondam’s only recorded snake, the paradise flying snake, a species found in Southeast Asia, but only on this island in Indian Territory.

Next stop was Manta Bay (nicknamed ‘Silly Manta’ after the description of the place read “silly numbers of mantas” in the Southeast Asia Pilot). As we pulled in, a medium-sized black manta swam below the surface. Excited, all of us jumped into the water, a couple with scuba and other with snorkels. Disappointingly, no other mantas were seen.

The Emerald Blue

Just past noon, with three sails hoisted and a strong wind behind us, we set course for Port Blair. Nick cut the engine, unfurled the two additional sails and silently, except for the sound of the yacht knifing through the waves, we sailed the old fashioned way. On a couple of occasions, we had to change direction to avoid colliding with oil tankers and cargo ships. From the early days of shipping, the distinctive profile of Narcondam has been a navigation aid, and even today this area appears to be a busy shipping corridor. As the island disappeared over the horizon, the nagging thought of not having reached the summit had me making plans for a return. That would entail the gauntlet of getting permits again. The devil in my head suggested: to hell with them, go on a fishing/diving trip and then find an excuse to climb the hill. Apparently by their very nature, the Gardens of Eden lead humans astray!