(posted on behalf of Amruta who is right now still bravely roaming the forests of Arunachal, counting her beloved Toko plants along the way...)

Kumar, Khem (my field assistants) and I were in Khari, which is an anti-poaching camp along the southern boundary of Pakke Wildlife Sanctuary & Tiger reserve in Arunachal Pradesh.

Forest at Khari

Our work plan was to explore forest patches here and locate as many populations as possible of our study species, Livistona jenkinsiana (commonly known as the Toko tree). The Toko is an ecologically and economically important Arecaceae member found in the tropical forests of Arunachal Pradesh. Several animals such as hornbills, squirrels, porcupines and wild boars are observed to feed upon its fruits. Several tribal communities across North-east India are known to extract their large leaf fronds to use as roof thatching material and the seeds are used for consumption as a substitute for betelnut. The interesting thing is that unlike symbolic tropical plant species, the Toko exhibits clumped and patchy distribution, restricted to specific microhabitat conditions.

An adult Toko tree loaded with fruits

In Pakke there are quite a few areas with substantial populations of Toko. However local communities continuously harvest the species and often the entire tree is cut down. Due to its increasing rarity in many areas in the wild, we thought it would be vital to study its reproductive ecology in this undisturbed but fragile rainforest ecosystem. Thus the first step was to explore the forest and get acquainted with the pattern of its patchy distribution.

Toko leaf: Its big size and waterproofing texture makes it a perfect roof-thatching material.

It was the month of August and so it wasn’t surprising that our day had begun with heavy showers.  We had our usual early meal and then sat around waiting for the rain to stop. In a couple of hours it stopped but the sky was still very dark. However our low ration levels kind of forced us to be optimistic about the weather and go ahead with the planned work for the day. So, Kumar, Khem and I pulled on our leech socks, packed some biscuits and cucumber (our usual lunch) made sure our equipments and observation sheets had enough water-proofing and set out to see what the day had to offer us.

The river was wide and high and the current really strong. So instead of walking along the river, which would have been easier, we decided to try and find the way through the forest. After a lot of bush bashing and getting ourselves stuck in knee-deep mud a few times, we reached the area we wanted to explore. Three of us were proving to be a great team. Kumar was doing a grand job of finding the way through the forest and Khem was  extremely happy to  use the GPS. It was with some difficulty that I managed to fill in the data sheets without getting them too wet. The leeches however were proving to be a real nuisance and we were struggling to work and get rid of them at the same time.  They would get lodged in your armpits, on your hair, stomach, back, face and even on your tongue. Kumar couldn’t stop laughing when he saw me trying to take a leech out of my mouth. He was probably wondering how I managed to let it in.

We had a few hours of productive work. The most exciting part for me was the sight of the first patch of Toko population that we came across. There were one-year seedlings, successive stages of saplings, sub-adults and adults all growing together. What it looked like to me was that in the forest this huge joint family of Toko for some reason had chosen to live on this hill for generations. I thought to myself, this is going to be very interesting, to try and find out what results in this patchy and clumped distribution of Toko. Is it (i) resistance to density dependent mortality below the parent tree in specific micro-climatic conditions, or is it ii) dispersal by specialized animal species that defecate the seeds in clumps in specific micro-climatic conditions required, for germination and recruitment? Or there is something more complex going on?

One-year old seedling of Toko. This one leaf after many years will grow up to provide hundreds of fruits essential for survival of various animals in the forest

One year old Toko seedling

Toko saplings of different ages

The sky slowly started getting dark again and my GPS started losing signal. The leeches also decided to be more affectionate towards us. It finally started drizzling, and this soon turned to a heavy shower. Leeches and the heavy rain didn’t stop me though and I continued on my Toko search. I think subconsciously I was enjoying the happiness of overcoming the initial nervousness I had, about my decision of working in these interior rainforests of India. This was my very first endeavor of learning about these mysterious forests. Although extremely excited about starting work in a completely new place with new people, I remember how anxious I was about being able to deal with leeches all over me, walking long distances in these dense unknown forests, the possibility of contracting malaria and independently applying myself to collect meaningful scientific data. The happiness was probably about attaining this feeling of comfort and the increased level of confidence about working and living in this new place.

Kumar and Khem however had completely given up on looking out for Toko and were busy removing leeches from different parts of their body with irritated and annoyed faces. I decided it was time we started walking back. Kumar was relieved to hear this and I guess as a return favor said, ‘Abhi hum log naya aur chota rasta se jayega, jungle ke aur ander ander se’ (We will go back through a new and shorter path which goes from further inside the forest). I was happy about this, since it meant being able to explore a new portion of the forest. It was a beautiful patch of forest with small meandering streams with crystal clear water running over pebbles and liana’s hanging over it. The rich soil, the trees, the sound of water and leaves, everything appeared magical and stunning. Kumar and Khem were walking in front and I was drifting behind, thinking how blessed I am, to be able to wander in these remaining patches of pristine rainforests.
My thoughts were broken by some sudden noise coming from my right and when I looked up, I saw a ‘Gaur’ running in my direction and it was not more than 10 meters away from me.  My first reaction was to run but then I saw its huge horns coming towards me and all I could remember are two thoughts running through my head. First, the Gaur is a little distance ahead of me and is running perpendicular to the path I am on, so if I keep running I am definitely going to get hit’. The second thought was ‘what’s going to happen next?’ I still don’t know if it was a natural instinct, but at that very precise moment I fell down just at the right time. When I sat on the ground I thought, ‘well, Amruta, you have probably escaped the horns but what about the feet? If they touch you even by mistake you are going to be in trouble!’ I closed my eyes and experienced what sounded like the the heaviest leap ever, over me. But that was it. When I got up I saw Kumar and Khem were making loud noises with their ‘daov’ (a local design of a machete) and the gaur was turning back. I ran and stood with Kumar and Khem and added to the noise. The Gaur turned back, but ran in the opposite direction to where we were standing. Once the Gaur had gone out of sight, the three of us looked at each other and spontaneously smiled at each other. Maybe we were happy I was unharmed or maybe we wanted to ask each other if we had imagined whatever just happened.

Kumar examined me and couldn’t believe that I had managed to escape without even a scratch on my body. We went to see the place where I had fallen and to find out from where and why the Gaur had come running the way it did. What was surprising was none of us had noticed the animal until it came so close.  None of us got a chance to tell each other to get prepared to run or defend ourselves. We think it was unlikely that it was standing there and just charged me. What was more probable was that it was already running away from something like a tiger or wild dogs and that I just happened to come in its way while it was running to save its own life. I guess only the Gaur knows why it was running at that speed.

Footprint of Mithun that landed over me

We saw the tree that the animal had banged his huge horns on, and had I not sat down, my condition would probably have been worse than that tree. What made me feel good about myself was that I did not panic at any point during those 10secs. I guess in such situations no one does since there is no time to panic! It is difficult to describe the exact feeling but I believe I felt lucky, happy, special and thrilled about those 10 seconds.

Wounded tree

On the way back we were discussing about the incident. I had been in the park for nearly three months and not seen a wild Gaur and I kept saying to Kumar and Khem, “etna din jungle mein gur raha hai, phir bhi Gaur nahi dekha ab tak.” (I have been roaming in the forest for so many days but still haven’t seen a wild Guar). Khem now said, “apko Gaur dekhna tha na! dekho! aur nazdik se dekho! (You wanted to see a Gaur right? Do you want to see a Gaur any closer now?)?” We all laughed.
What a day it had been. I thanked nature for taking care of me and making one more day of my life so beautiful and special.

The name given him was R. K. G. Menon, but that was not how he was known. He had a nickname of long standing—60 years, no less—emerging from the hallowed corridors of the Madras Christian College: Cutlet. He was always, to all of us who knew him, just Cutlet.

R. K. G. Menon (Cutlet)

Imagine a rugged man turning into his fifties carrying out, during 1977-79, a full-fledged field study of the behaviour of blackbuck at Guindy National Park and Point Calimere, initiating systematic waterbird counts in Vedanthangal, carrying out and publishing in 1982 what were perhaps the first population estimates for an ungulate in India using line transect techniques, and all of this years ahead of any similar effort by other Indian, university-trained and funded researchers and field biologists. Imagine a man without a formal college degree or training or affiliation, who yet kept pace with the advances in scientific thinking in animal behaviour and ethology and could not only discuss this with clarity but also apply it in his own work. Cutlet was this and more.

Till his last days, watching blackbuck and interpreting their behaviour would delight him no end.

I used to meet Cutlet during meetings or field trips of the Madras Naturalists’ Society (MNS), an organisation he helped to found. There was little close interaction of the sort that came later, because in the initial days I was merely learning the ropes of basic birdwatching, interested in just getting outdoors, all excited with every new species I saw, and little else. Even then, at the Adyar estuary and other places, I remember him, spouting clouds of smoke from his pipe, teaching me to use my binoculars properly, and telling me to take detailed field notes, to count the number of birds and not stop with just identification, and to observe their behaviour. “Write it down. If you think its all in your memory, it is not worth it. It’s just kaka-pee [crow-shit]“, he would say, or something similar and with more choice adjectives that I, unfortunately, cannot repeat here.

Cutlet (in centre) at the Adyar estuary with friends (Photo courtesy: V. Santharam).

It was almost exactly twenty years ago, when he had crossed 60 years of age and I was dawdling through my late teens, that I got to watch him in the field. We were both part of a small group of nature enthusiasts from MNS trekking to Konalar in the Anamalai hills. Although he kept company with us on the trek and in the evenings, he would take off on his own through the grassland during the day to sit quietly somewhere observing tahr or langur or whatever else caught his attention that day. He would not brook crowds, noisy or otherwise, even of nature enthusiasts, that came to see wildlife but did not observe. And he would make no bones of telling this to his companions or to comment on this in his writings as well. One day, we found a dead sambar nearby and Cutlet observed the broken neck and patiently tracked the signs around, showing us signs and scats and interpreting based on what he knew of the carnivores, that this was a tiger kill. On that trip, I learnt from him some of the hallmarks of fieldwork, about good backpacks and footwear, usage of binoculars and deprecation of cameras, about silence and observation, field clothing and sleeping bags, not to mention a number of hilarious jokes, songs, and limericks in the evenings.

Cutlet was a well-read man with a scientific temper, a character that distinguished him from many other naturalists around him. I do not know of him missing a chance to immediately borrow and eagerly read any interesting book, whether it was field research or a serious scientific text or monograph on animal behaviour, ethology, and evolution. The list of books and authors that I was introduced to and read thanks to him is a large list, indeed. The Mountain Gorilla by George Schaller was a defining book that turned me towards field research in wildlife. Cutlet did not just tell me to read it, but helped locate what was perhaps the only accessible copy in Chennai: from the shelves of the library of IIT Madras, where the book had lain almost unnoticed. Not having the means himself to purchase many books or build a private collection, Cutlet was heavily dependent on libraries and friends for access to books or journals. He pointed me to the Connemara library to find Gorillas in the Mist by Dian Fossey, or old volumes of the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society. Off to R. Selvakumar’s house to request copies of other books by Schaller to read. Head to the British Council Library for Niko Tinbergen’s The Study of Instinct. And so on.

The authors and books I got to read and discuss threadbare with him in his one-room rented house in Gandhi Nagar, Adyar, are a revealing list, when I think of them now. He’d read all of them, and if I managed to get a copy, he often read them a second time. In ethology, books by Niko Tinbergen (The Study of Instinct, extracts from The Herring Gull’s World) and Konrad Lorenz (King Solomon’s Ring, On Aggression) topped the list. From these, we would chat about Tinbergen’s four questions, about interpreting super-normal stimuli and intention movements, about displacement activities and imprinting. More textbook-like among the books were McFarland’s Animal Behaviour and Dimond’s The Social Behaviour of Animals. Among field studies, we would discuss classics like Fraser Darling’s A Herd of Red Deer and David Lack’s The Life of the Robin and a whole host of more recent books from field research. George Schaller on lions, gorillas, deer and tiger would recur. Hans Kruuk on hyenas, Douglas-Hamilton, Cynthia Moss, and Joyce Poole on African elephants, Clutton-Brock on red deer and primates, David Mech on wolves, and, of course, out of his special interest in blackbuck, Fritz Walther and Elizabeth Cary Mungall on gazelles and antelopes. I got to read many of these thanks to the libraries at CES and the Indian Institute of Science and through the help of Raman Sukumar.

Cutlet was also up-to-scratch on the rapidly growing field of evolution and sociobiology. He’d read and could hold forth on E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology, Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene and a slew of other books and ideas that were among the most interesting developments from the 1970s through the 1990s. I remember wading through arguments over The Blind Watchmaker and The Extended Phenotype. I remember Cutlet’s appreciation for and critical thoughts on ideas considered rather divergent at the time, such as Zahavi’s concept of signal selection and the handicap principle and Wynne-Edwards’s theory of group selection. In all of this, he would try and link the concepts to his own observations of blackbuck and other animals. How the blackbuck pelage and behaviour linked to signal selection. How its territoriality can be understood in relation to ideas spanning Fraser Darling and Lack and Robert Ardrey (The Territorial Imperative) to Walther and Mungall.

Books like Sinclair’s The African Buffalo and Schaller’s The Deer and the Tiger linked behavior and ecology. Cutlet was not too hot on the field of ecology per se and somewhat de-emphasised looking at plants. Still, the field of behavioural ecology interested him. When I got a copy of a new edition of the classic Krebs and Davies textbook on behavioural ecology, he read it and tried to see links to blackbuck behavioural ecology. One of the topics we would repeatedly discuss is the decline of blackbuck population in Guindy National Park. Cutlet saw how reduced numbers had profoundly changed the social behaviour and reduced interactions among males. He saw territorial and social interactions as key in stimulating reproduction and believed that the population decline was an example of an Allee effect at work. Trying to bring to the attention of the Wildlife Warden various pertinent aspects related to conservation of this blackbuck population, Cutlet explained the possibility of such an effect in simple terms in a letter written in January 1993. Once again, this was perhaps an idea that was ahead of its time or our own data, which I encountered being discussed in leading journals only years later.

In retrospect, what made these bouts of reading and discussions a great learning experience for me and fascinating for Cutlet, was perhaps the fact that neither of us had anything to lose or anything material to gain from it. It was pure curiosity and personal interest. Cutlet was far removed from any academic or peer pressures to perform cutting-edge research, publish papers, or proclaim his scientific interest or ability. The bureaucracy and corridors of academia, that can stultify as often as it can stimulate, were not for him. He had no job on the line, no tenure to uphold, no defining seminar or workshop to commit to, no funding priority to meet, no deadline-driven reports to prepare (barring a few that he wrote for the Forest Department on management issues). My college coursework (BSc Zoology) was as archaic and lifeless as a beat-up tin can and the dead specimens being dissected in our labs. What I dabbled with in ecology or ethology and the books I read were de-linked from exams and grades and performance in courses. And so, the reading and the discussions seemed to work, and they seemed worth it.

Although he had no formal training in quantitative aspects of the science, Cutlet still believed in repeated observation and quantification using proper sampling techniques. Years before I was formally (and in a more text-book fashion) introduced to behavioural sampling techniques, I got a thorough grounding in the basic methods from Cutlet. Out of his sundry collection of reprints, he yanked out a well-used photocopy of a paper that still remains a classic in the field: Jeanne Altmann’s 1974 paper on sampling methods for the observational study of behaviour, a paper that has seen upwards of 6000 citations till date, some of them Cutlet’s. Cutlet spoke of the benefits of different kinds of sampling for different aspects of his study of blackbuck behaviour, and the terms and ideas slowly sinked in: ad libitum sampling, focal animal sampling (his favoured method, especially on identified individuals), scans and other methods. He exhorted me to make a copy of the paper and read it; we would march off to observe the behaviour of chital and blackbuck at Guindy National Park. Cutlet described how to make an ethogram, identify and name individuals, code behavioural data, and how to watch animals unobtrusively. When I thought I would start a study on chital behaviour in Guindy National Park to complement his work on blackbuck, he gave me a copy of a 1981 paper by Shingo Miura on social behaviour by chital in Guindy that helped me get started. Cutlet would similarly exhort other MNS members and students to add value to their field trips by doing systematic counts and observations. The number of younger people he helped in the field of wildlife studies is not a small one. In many ways, he was one of the best teachers I had.

With backpack strapped on perfectly and a cigar in his mouth, Cutlet poses with a bunch of younger nature enthusiasts during a field trip (Photo courtesy: M. Raghunathan).

Cutlet also taught me the basics of field work, by example and demonstration rather than lecture. Besides behavioural observations, he trained me in the basic line transect method, that involved walking along straight lines through the forest and counting animals and measuring distances to animals on either side. Cutlet was perhaps the first person to apply line transect techniques to estimate population density for ungulates in India, publishing a paper in 1982 in the Indian journal Cheetal with estimates of chital populations. His work was based on one of the early publications that developed this survey method, the paper by Anderson and Pospahala (1970). Cutlet had also approached a statistics professor at the Madras University to understand the method and then applied it in his work. By the time I began my work, the methods had developed further and a computer software called TRANSECT was available and I could easily learn how to use it with from Sukumar and others at CES. Still, I had to learn the ropes in the field. Cutlet had an excellent liquid-filled magnetic compass (he always appreciated good equipment, particularly binoculars and telescopes, and would repair and maintain them in good condition himself) and he taught me to use it to walk the transect and maintain the course through the forest. Find and hold to the bearing, use the mirror, and sight along the viewing slit at a distant tree or landmark and then march towards that. “When an army marches through the desert, the guy holding the compass would have to direct the others. He needs to find a lone palm tree that can be a reference to navigate.  And as he marches, he’d have to call out periodically: Lone palm tree, Sir!”, Cutlet said, half in jest. As the compass-bearer while walking transects with Cutlet in Guindy and the nearby IIT campus, I would then often choose a palmyrah tree as marker and say: “Lone palm tree, Sir!”.

Still, Cutlet was highly self-deprecating. He would reiterate his lack of formal qualifications and scientific training and tell me that he was no good and that if I wanted to really learn the ropes or make a mark in this field I should go see others, the real scientists, the professors. As I made a faltering start at my own field project on chital and blackbuck in Guindy National Park with his help, Cutlet repeatedly urged me to go to Sukumar at IISc for guidance (”he is the elephant man who knows stuff about populations and ecology”). He also pointed me to Ajith Kumar, another person he held in great  professional regard and personal affection (”Ajith is a Cambridge man who’s worked with David Chivers”, “go talk to him”).

Cutlet, and what he was as an ethologist and curious naturalist, was largely overlooked by most people who knew him. Cutlet was a no-nonsense man and would get rather irritated by others who chose to remain ignorant of science and ideas, who merely went for nature trips to picnic outdoors but nevertheless would loudly spout an entrenched opinion about why animals did this or that. He would not mince words when speaking to such people and, in his earlier years, would not baulk at using the most colourful language either. This, as expected, put some people off. This, coupled with his lack of formal qualifications, his self-deprecating comments, and his solitary existence in a dingy one-room house, appeared to provide adequate reason to those who wished to turn their face away from him. And there were those who perhaps thought he was a mere curiosity, a loner better left to his pipe and his eccentric predispositions. Although Cutlet was somewhat chauvinistic at times and could come out as strongly opinionated in his own way, he could and would be swayed by a well-substantiated and logical argument. Kavita Isvaran, now a leading scientist who has herself carried out detailed studies of blackbuck behaviour, speaks about how when she first met Cutlet to discuss the phenomenon of lekking in blackbuck he was very skeptical, almost dismissive. Through the course of a thorough discussion he, however, eventually came round to recognise that his understanding, restricted as it was largely to one population, needed to be expanded to accommodate the findings of newer research.

Yet, it was his own fieldwork that really defined Cutlet. Cutlet made over a thousand hours of focal animal observations on blackbuck (often working from dawn to dusk in the field) and analysed and worked on several drafts and manuscripts on blackbuck behaviour. He carried out fortnightly water bird counts at Vedanthangal in 1981–82 using a block count technique from standard locations, a method that others from MNS were able to replicate in 1991 to compare with his data. When a collaborative opportunity arose (with very meagre but vital funds) to monitor chital antler cycles, Cutlet would pedal off in his cycle to in GNP and IIT and walk all over to survey chital for up to 15 days every month for two years, meticulously classifying individuals by antler size, stage, and condition.

The times and circumstances were not very kind to Cutlet. Coming from a well-off family and once the proud owner of a 1000cc V-twin Vincent HRD Black Shadow (one of the fastest motorcycles of that period) among other bikes, he lived his final years in his one-room house, getting around on a moped or a bicycle, but still remarkably content with himself. He worked without funds and in his spare time during various jobs that he took on to make ends meet. He had no formal support for statistical analysis or preparation of results and graphics. He extracted numbers from his notes and punched them into a trusty calculator to calculate quantitative measures describing blackbuck behaviour: rates of aggression, time spent in various activities and so on. He made charts and territory maps, drawing them with ruler and pencil on graph paper. He wrote drafts of manuscripts in a flowing long hand on foolscap sheets, usually with an excellent fountain pen (Parker, was a favourite brand, with Chelpark ink, as were Sheaffer’s). His English was old-style and excellent, but he would re-read and edit, and if major reorganisation was required he would rewrite by hand. To make copies to send to someone for comments he often copied by hand as well. When it was in a shape that he deemed worthy of submitting for publication or soliciting comments from a scientific colleague, he would march off to a nearby commercial typist and get it typed, proofed (especially to correct the glaring errors of the typist of all biological and scientific terms, not to mention having a good laugh every time ‘agonistic behaviour’ was typed as ‘agnostic behaviour’), and then typed again. He took pains to do this for many articles he wrote and the few errors that crept in in the published versions should perhaps not be laid at his doorstep.

Only a small part of these studies has ever been published. Not only his research on blackbuck, but his work on antler cycles that was meant as a collaborative study. While Cutlet wrote drafts on various aspects of blackbuck behaviour based on his field study, he’d laid much effort into analysing and writing about agonistic and territorial behaviour. He worked on detailed manuscripts on these aspects (the originals of which are unfortunately not available) and sent them to Dr. Elizabeth Cary Mungall, the leading blackbuck researcher at the time, for comments and feedback. She responded with detailed comments on the text, tables, and figures exhorting him to publish it as it “… will be an interesting contribution to the literature”. In a letter dated 4 May 1983, she writes:

You are doing good work and all of us who share your interest in blackbuck and their relatives thank you for your efforts in bringing your results to publication so that the rest of us can learn about your results also.

Some of the drafts that do exist of his writings are put up in a separate website for reference by biologists, naturalists, those interested in animal behaviour, and anyone else who would like to see and understand the fascinating world of blackbuck and other species through the eyes of Cutlet. These and his published writings provide an indication of the earnestness and range of interests of the man writing under his real name of R. K. G. Menon, who, behind the scenes, was still just Cutlet to everyone. Besides his own work on blackbuck and chital, he worked on scientific papers with G. U. Kurup (on the behaviour of blackbuck during a solar eclipse), with A. Rajaram on the microscopic study of hairs of Indian mammals, with V. Santharam on waterbird populations at Vedanthangal, and he guided and co-authored work with me and R. Sukumar on the decline of blackbuck and ecology of chital and blackbuck in Guindy National Park. In more general articles, he wrote about crows and dogs, sambar and tiger, and of course, blackbuck. There are brief articles about crop-raiding elephants and man-eating leopard (he visited Suligiri, where a man-eating leopard was shot by government diktat). He wrote of rollers and lapwings, of cannibalism and protean behaviour, and of days spent in the jungles of his memories.

Cutlet had a number of other friends who he was fond of and had often had a rollicking good time with. My association with Cutlet being largely related to our shared interest in animal behaviour and Guindy, I know little about his other friends, his family, or his life beyond the blackbuck or prior to the 1990s. Still among those naturalists and nature enthusiasts I knew, Cutlet stood apart for his efforts and his enthusiasm concerning animal behaviour. As Mungall wrote in her letter of 1983:

You mention that you have no support from any group and yet you list yourself as a naturalist of the Range Rover Foundation, Adyar, Madras. Is this a volunteer group? Is it very active in wildlife conservation? If all its members are like you, it certainly is a wonderful organization for India.

A couple of days before he died, he called his close friends, went out with them, had a meal at their home. He was happy, but in his talk his friends detected a poignant tone. On the morning of 26 December 2008, while walking back home after a regular meal at his regular hotel, he collapsed and passed away on the streets of Madras. He was 80 years old.

I have pondered over what can be a fitting memory of this remarkable man who sought no recognition or acclaim and always stayed off the limelight. Perhaps a permanent record of his contributions, as we have tried to do in this website. Perhaps, if there is someone watching (and watching over) the blackbuck of Guindy that he loved so much, that would be apt. Perhaps, if someone carried on the bird counts that he initiated at Vedanthangal, the water bird populations would mark his memory in the trends of their numbers. Perhaps some effort at sustaining this locally through the MNS, an organisation that he helped found. Or perhaps, in a much broader sense, the very continuation of a free spirit of enquiry and passion for ethology that marked his life would be sufficient. In the final reckoning, Cutlet lived alone and cut his own swathe through this life. He was, in a very real way, like the lone palm tree he spoke of. A lone palm tree, serving as a benchmark in the wilderness, that we can keep referring to as we find direction in our own lives. “Lone palm tree, Sir!“

My music player switched songs to ‘The Wind cries Mary’ just as my eyes wandered towards some trees. A speck of white on one of the tree trunks caught my eye. I looked again and noticed more white circles along the side of the tree trunk.  With a guitar wailing in my ears and my mind doing a scan of the bark for a possible critter, I moved closer to the tree. The white circles had more dimensions than I thought. They were eggs.

The gecko as 'nanny' of the brood

My mind instantly raced back to a rock crevice I had seen many years ago on a hill in Vellore. I had spent many years there during my childhood, exploring the hillsides and seeing lizards of all kinds—rock agamas, golden geckos, garden lizards, monitors, termite hill geckos, and of course common house geckos. Of these, the golden geckos got some scientific attention when the area became part of a range extension in their distribution across India. It was also here that I got to see gecko eggs cemented on the sides of a rock and learnt that this was how some geckos ‘nested’.

Back at Chowra, I walked up to the tree and gazed at the spherical moon-shaped blobs stuck on the tree trunk. There were eight in all, in four pairs, a little distance from each other. I wondered which gecko could have laid such large eggs when there was a movement next to the eggs and there appeared a flat-tailed gliding gecko (Ptychozoon nicobarensis). She was large and beautifully camouflaged against the bark, and obviously didn’t like the look of me, for when I took two pictures of her, she disappeared behind the trunk and out of view. I figured she was mom to those eggs. (Rom Whitaker later told me that she would have laid only a pair, and other females quite possibly laid the rest in pairs, as if in a nursery, with one female taking the responsibility as nanny of the brood.)

Despite my attempts to creep up behind her, she always had the advantage of stealth and camouflage and I had to return in the dark to get a few more pictures. In the evening, she was more approachable and decidedly more active in the comfort of the darkness. She hunted insects along the trunk, spotting potential prey, creeping over, and flicking her flat tail with a flourish, then leaping if need be to return to her perch to munch and swallow her food. She would then look out eagerly with her large eyes for more prey, licking her chaps in with a grin. This was my first brush with wildlife on Chowra (I had seen a few species of birds during the day, but the birds being finicky and airborne much of the time, I didn’t get a chance to observe most).

Gliding gecko hunting at night; note her flat tail.

A few days later, while interviewing a young Chowra couple—beautiful hosts who were the first to invite me to a lovely lunch of spicy fish curry with chillies and rice—we heard a screech and looked around to see children race out from near a young coconut tree where they were playing. They were pointing to a slithering snake on the branch. I left my notebook and lunged for the snake. It was a bronzeback tree snake but with unusual black blotches along its neck. Thin and graceful, it was all the more fascinating for its fearlessness at my approach.

The bronzeback snake

Within a few seconds, it calmed down and all I had to do was give it enough assurance that I was not going to do it any harm. I was the centre of attention, having grabbed a snake. ‘Paich’—the word for snake in Sanenyo, the language of Chowra Islanders—was uttered by everyone as more people came to see the commotion. They knew that it was a non-poisonous snake, but asked me why I wasn’t scared that it would try and get inside me through the orifices on my body—specifically the one in my rear! This was of course the strangest of thoughts, and I quickly dismissed it with a laugh. Snakes slithering through the anus—it was a strange but imaginative connection! Then I had a problem. No one was willing to help me photograph the snake by holding it while I took pictures. I resorted to holding it with one hand and the camera with the other. Thank god for auto-focus digital cameras! I got a few decent pictures before I released it onto the tree, after assuring the villagers of the snake’s decided non-preference for regions like human rears, nostrils and ears.

The snake slithering away (not through the anus!)

This was getting better—first a lovely and large flying gecko and then this gorgeous bronzeback. After a few days of fieldwork, I planned a visit to the swiftlet caves on Chowra. These were located on a cliff within a small forest. We trudged past a few plantations and kitchen gardens beyond the main village before entering the forest. At the base of the cliff, I was asked to wait along with a few others while the owner of the cave climbed up past the craggy rocks, using the roots of a Ficus tree draped over the cliff as handholds and footholds.  We followed suit and I took a host of pictures before we returned in single file to the forest floor. I was the last on the path, when a brown tail in a crevice caught my attention—snake?  All of us had placed our hands in this crevice, using it as a handhold while climbing up and down the cliff. I stopped and peeked in and saw a pit viper, its head resting on its coils, unmindful of our proximity or the use of its den. This was the best yet!

I had not expected to see a pit viper, because I was told they were quite rare on the island. I took as many shots as I could and didn’t disturb it with an intrusive scale count—thinking rather of showing the picture to people who were interested in taxonomy to find out which species of pit viper it was. I was happy and pleased that within just five days of ethnographic work on the island, I came across more than one species of herp. The wind cried ‘Mary!’ as Jimi Hendrix’s song played itself out in my first brush with the gecko, giving me luck and a song to play in my mind—making what was otherwise a focused field trip far more exciting than I’d expected.

The paper in Nature, an accompanying editorial, the seven commentaries from leading experts, available here, are worth a read for anyone who wants an overview of what the major human impacts on the planet are and where they are headed. Specifically, the authors deal with the following nine issues:

1. climate change
2. ocean acidification
3. stratospheric ozone depletion
4. freshwater use
5. biodiversity
6. the global cycles of nitrogen and phosphorus
7. land-use change
8. atmospheric aerosol loading (to be quantified)
9. chemical pollution (to be quantified)

The paper suggests that three boundaries related to climate change, biological diversity, nitrogen and phosphorous dumping into the biosphere, may already have been exceeded. A brief summary of the findings with relevant links is also available here at the website of the Stockholm Resilience Centre where the lead author Johan Rockström is based. The seven commentaries along with some other recent research highlights are also available here. The real meat of the paper is actually in a parallel publication in the journal Ecology and Society. Although this paper is in press, it is available here and this contains the details of the issues at stake, the underlying rationales, and references to the scientific literature based on which the conclusions are drawn.

In our context, given India’s demographic profile and dependence on agriculture, the aspects related to freshwater use and nitrogen-phosphorous cycles are really worthy of note. Water shortages in the country and the severe depletion of groundwater were recently again in the news following a paper in Nature. Anthropogenic nitrogen loading is already affecting our terrestrial ecosystems, coastal and marine areas, and rivers. Reporting high values of dissolved and sediment-bound nitrogen in Indian rivers, partly due to excessive fertiliser use and associated run-off, the authors of the last study grimly conclude: “Hence, our freshwater aquatic systems can no longer be considered natural, at least with respect to nitrogen transport.”

A quick survey of the debate emerging from the papers by Rockström and colleagues indicates two main questions are being asked (among others spurred by the publications). First, is it sensible to set a tipping-point benchmark, however scientifically tenuous it may be given the current state of knowledge? There is concern that this might cause complacence among policy makers and administrators, who may avoid responding to the situation until the benchmark is reached or exceeded. The second is the issue of  benchmark itself: for instance, in the case of biodiversity loss. The authors of the study use extinction rate as a measure of biodiversity loss. In Table 1, they indicate a pre-industrial value of rate of extinction at 0.1 to 1 species per million species per year. The current rate of extinction is >100 species per million per year and the proposed boundary is 10 species per million per year. What makes this an acceptable boundary or rate of loss of species?

The overall picture that emerges is alarming, to say the least. The climate crisis is familiar; our newspapers are full of it now. Other concerns appear less commonly in the media. For instance, that our oceans, which absorb some 25% of human CO2 emissions, are undergoing acidification at a rate 100 times higher than at any time in the past 20 million years. This makes a whole range of marine organisms, such as corals and molluscs, susceptible to corrosion of their shells (made of calcium carbonate in the form of aragonite). The decline of aragonite-forming organisms and coral reefs could substantially alter marine ecosystems. Another global concern is that of human tampering of the planetary nitrogen cycles. Human activities now input more reactive nitrogen into the planet than all natural processes combined. As a large part of this enters the biosphere, it alters terrestrial ecosystems, as well as freshwater and marine ecosystems.

The paper will doubtless spur more discussions and research into the various benchmarks and their utility in tracking the human footprint. Despite the debates and shortcomings, one real value of the paper as it appears to me is that it brings into one page—onto one figure even, superimposed ominously on the globe—an assessment and visualisation of the nine-fold stranglehold that humans as a species have on Earth. Looking at it we have to keep asking: is the human journey reaching the edges of the Earth?

The solution being proposed is a new scheme with an annual worth of 800 billion US dollars that has been given the moniker, Payment for Evolutionary Services and Technology fund (the PEST fund). Explaining the principle behind the PEST fund, Dr. Gonsalves said, ecstatically, “Species are the cornerstone of evolution. The extinction of a species signals the end of a long evolutionary process and deprives us of vital evolutionary resources that we could otherwise exploit for the benefit of mankind. In order to prevent the extinction of species, we have evolved a novel market-linked fund that will incentivise governments, private players, even individuals, to conserve evolutionary processes that make species what they are.”

Initiatives launched with the fund include a 10 million dollar grant to a field research centre in Ecuador to keep Darwin’s Finches evolving in the Galapagos Islands, a 2 million dollar community-based project that will enable villagers in Mexico to keep the mutualism between yucca and yucca moths going, and a seed-grant to an industrial consortium in Birmingham that will experiment with different kinds of air pollution to promote the evolution of different races of peppered moths in the region.

Laboratory-based evolutionary scientists around the world are also overjoyed at the initiative as it earmarks a full 50% or 400 billion US dollars for direct payments to labs breeding populations of the ultimate evolutionary milch-cow that never seems to run out of milk: the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. An additional 5% allocated just for experimentation related to tinkering of Drosophila salivary glands has left competing scientists working on other aspects, such as growing legs on fruit fly heads, virtually salivating.

Financing the fund is the world’s behemoth financial institution, the Bank of the Earth, which is providing the fund on easy terms. For implementing institutions in developed nations, it is provided as a low interest loan, while emerging economies may obtain these funds as interest-free loans or straight grants. This would be decided by economists at the well-staffed Bank of the Earth Coordination Centres currently being established within the offices of Prime Ministers and Presidents in the latter countries.

As in the case of many such large and popular schemes, the PEST fund has led to controversies in academic circles. Trenchant criticism has emerged from rival players who have tried to establish payments for ecosystem services (such as clean air, water, and carbon capture). Besides the loss of a pithy acronym to a larger project, proponents of payments for ecosystem services are worried that PEST funds will actually work against their own limited achievements thus far. The rival group is led by a group think-tank called the Coalition Against Vitiating Evolution for Monetary or Economic Net profits (CAVEMEN). CAVEMEN spokesperson, Dr. Clubb Hunter, in a press statement said, “Many evolutionary processes unleashed by humans work against nature and ecology, such as the evolution of more virulent diseases resistant to our best drugs, the varieties of invasive alien species spreading on every continent, and the evolution of couch-potato genes among certain human groups. Should we really be paying for all this, and that too in hard cash?”

Climate change nay-sayers also receive a fresh shot in the arm as aspects of human endeavour leading to further climate change that is likely to drive adaptation and evolution in plant and animal species are now eligible for PEST funds. The beneficiaries may range from airlines spewing greenhouses gases and engine fumes into the upper atmosphere over polar regions, nuclear and thermal power plants emptying warmed-up coolant water in cold rivers with endemic aquatic fauna, to those raising high-yielding, high-belching methanogenic cattle on Amazonian pastures adjoining biodiversity-rich conservation areas, observers of the PEST fund have noted.

The PEST fund has, however, won support from an unlikely quarter: social scientists and anthropologists. “This scheme is founded on well-established theory in social and human psychology”, said Dr. Eliza Doomuch, a retired social scientist and farmer in Kentucky and an architect of social revolution in the American South. “People will value things only if they are paid to do so”, she said. Taking a leaf from this successful scheme, she has founded a novel movement that promises to rid the world of racism, torture, and genocide, among other things such as parent-offspring conflict and sibling rivalry. This initiative, tentatively labeled Payments for Decency, will provide direct economic incentive to any human who shows basic decency, as defined by the International Consortium of Decent Human Beings, to other humans. Knowledgeable sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, indicated that keeping the future potential of this seminal idea to alleviate human suffering in mind, Dr Doomuch is already in the reckoning for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Yet, not everyone is happy. Among the first to raise questions about this trend to pay even for basic decency to other humans or to our planet is the Dixie Endeavor for Ecology and Population Solutions for Humanity In Transition, the only such NGO on the planet that does not use any acronym. When contacted for their opinion, this writer was told tersely, “We are refuse to accept this.”

None of these misgivings deterred the gala press conference in Washington, D. C., however. As Dr. Gonsalves said, in an euphoric tone, “We need to save species for human benefit. When humankind stands to gain so directly, it does not really matter how we do it, does it?”

* * * * *

Disclaimer: All future events even remotely resembling the above fiction are entirely coincidental and unintentional.

An endangered lion-tailed macaque lies dead on the road in a rain forest fragment in the Western Ghats. (Photo: Kalyan Varma)

Crunch! Splat! Thud! A daily massacre is occurring under the wheels of our vehicles. Thousands of lives are snuffed out tragically, instantaneously, and yet, we hardly notice.

Around India, as in other parts of the world, millions of animals risk daily encounter with increasingly fast vehicles plying on an expanding meshwork of roads and highways. Roads through our countryside and forests and the people who drive vehicles on these routes cause the highest toll. This is a toll of actual lives—a headcount of animals crushed to death or else greviously injured and mutilated. Even leaving aside domestic dogs and cats, an indiscriminate diversity of wild species from butterflies, squirrels, lizards, and partridges to more threatened species such as leopard cats to tigers and lions, mouse deer to sambar and elephant, lorises to langurs and lion-tailed macaques, and sheildtail snakes to king cobras come to a sticky end.

The scale of the problem is imposing. India boasts of having the second largest road network in the world, second only to the United States. According to India’s National Economic Survey of 2007 ― 08, this is no less than 3.34 million kilometres [1]. Although only around half of this is surfaced and less than 2 percent of this comprises National Highways, the latter alone account for 40% of our total traffic. Like many things in India, the ‘total’ in that expression is a very large number indeed. In 2006, India already had around 86 million registered motor vehicles. A study [2] from IIM, Lucknow, records that the distance travelled in a year by a person in India (averaged across the entire population) soared from 285 km in 1950 — 51 to 3,470 km in 2000 — 01. At the time of writing, even this has nearly doubled. The study also estimates a staggering total motorized traffic volume of around 5,600 billion passenger-kilometres per year, currently. With an annual rate of increase hovering around 7 – 8%, this is poised to skyrocket to nearly 13,000 billion passenger kilometres by 2020.

With such traffic, it would be scarcely surprising if animal kill rates were high, too. Roads passing through forest and other natural areas such as grasslands and wetlands are of greater concern from a conservation point of view. The few studies that are available from Indian forests indicate a grave situation already. Studies have documented kills ranging from dragonflies and butterflies, to many larger mammals and birds including carnivores [3]. Around noon in Nagarahole – Bandipur in southern India, as 50 – 100 vehicles zip past every hour, a study patiently documented around 40 kills of insects such as butterflies and dragonflies for every 10 km every day, doubling over the weekends with increased traffic. A rough calculation indicates that vehicles here kill around 15,000 animals every year in just that 10 km of road [4]. In the Anamalai hills of southern India, a study of road kills of reptiles and amphibians found that around 6 were killed per 10 km of road every day during the monsoon [5]. Conservative extrapolation would suggest that a 100 km stretch of road through forests here witnesses an annual slaughter of around 10,000 amphibians and reptiles. Even this estimation is based on a study carried out 10 years ago when traffic volumes were much lower. Widening of roads and unregulated, ill-planned tourist influx has, if anything, made things worse.

Reptiles, such as this vine snake, and amphibians are among the worst hit in road kills. Photo: Kalyan Varma

Species struggle to survive

Such patterns of death on the highways are a common feature wherever roads traverse our forests, grasslands, and wetlands. Along the Western Ghats alone—a hill range much touted as a centre of amphibian and reptilian diversity with so many new species even now being discovered and described—hundreds of thousands are probably killed every year. These numbers should not make us proud that we have so many animals to subject to such wanton slaughter—that would merely be a dangerous assumption, a form of denial, or sheer ignorant optimism. Neither can we take heart from areas where few deaths are now seen along roads, until we can be certain that this is not due to populations having already been pushed over the brink.

Planners and managers neglect to take the problem seriously. Even when they are aware of the issue, they feel nothing needs to be done because they believe that while many are killed on roads, many others escape and the species can survive. What they fail to understand is that the additional mortality on roads can tilt the demographic scale against a population that already grapples with various natural factors and human-caused disturbances for survival. Studies from elsewhere have revealed that the negative effects of high traffic density can be as serious as direct loss of forest cover for amphibians and traffic needs to be avoided or maintained at low density for up to 2 km around breeding ponds if frog diversity is to be conserved in the landscape [6]. Another study estimates that even if 10% or more of the adults annually risk being killed by vehicles along roads near breeding areas, the population will eventually perish [7].

In most cases, all that the animal is trying to do is, like the proverbial chicken, to get to the other side. The road surface and corridor itself is of little use to most animals. Perhaps a dove or myna would find some fallen scraps of food worth eating, a lizard or snake may be attracted to bask on the hot surface, as to a rock on a sunny day. Dragonflies and mayflies may be attracted to the polarized light emanating from the asphalt, a form of light pollution that fools them into believing that they are over the surface of a water body [8]. As they fly around to feed or defend territories or even try to lay eggs on the water-road, they imperil their own survival. And then the road becomes an ecological death-trap [9], where the very adaptations evolved over millenia to enable these species to locate their food and thrive in their environment now nudge them to their death.

Even quick-footed species, such as this leopard cat, get killed with the increasingly faster traffic. Photo: Kalyan Varma

Deadly break in tree cover

The roadkill threat is not something only ground-dwelling face. The threat of roadkills is particularly acute for many tree-dwelling species that do not normally cross on the ground. With roads mercilessly slicing through our forests and government departments and road contractors recklessly widening roads and slashing all vegetation, including regenerating trees and saplings on either side, the tree cover breaks over the road. Besides loss of natural vegetation and native species typical to each area, this causes increased soil erosion and landslides. This leads to further expenditure in road maintenance—providing further opportunity for ecological damage. All of this adds to wastage of public money, while also wrecking the tree cover that would have allowed many species to safely cross the road overhead.

Unable to cross overhead using the overlapping branches of intact forest canopies, the animals now face a permanent problem—a serious, life-threatening challenge—of a gap caused by the break in tree cover over the road. That crossing, even if takes only a few seconds or minutes, can be an agonisingly long and threatening one for an animal trying to cross even a moderately busy road. In the absence of tree cover, arboreal animals are sometimes forced to use electric wires of powerlines to cross, leading to the double jeopardy of electrocution deaths for species such as lorises and lion-tailed macaques [10]. The roads and powerlines through our forests are increasingly turning into graveyards of tree-dwelling species such as monkeys, lorises, civets, squirrels, and tree shrews.

Animals may also be seriously stressed or change their behaviour in the vicinity of roads. Studies from Africa on elephants and chimpanzees, have shown how they tend to avoid roads and change their behaviour, due to the associated risks as one would expect from such highly intelligent species [11].

An elephant mother uses her body to shield her calf from an approaching vehicle as they cross the road. Photo: Kalyan Varma

Other factors may compound the road problem. The building of culverts, fencerails, barricades, chain-link and barbed-wire fences, and other concrete and metal structures along roads makes the crossing even more difficult. Parapet-like walls running without a break for hundreds of metres or kilometres along roads, especially on hill roads, become insurmountable obstacles for species such as porcupines, pangolins, turtles, young birds and mammals, to name just a few. On hill slopes disfigured by such roads, even large animals such as sambar and elephants have to negotiate the upper slope, cross the road, and try to somehow step or jump over roadside walls and culverts to step or land safely on the steep lower slope. Another compounding factor is the attraction of animals to road-killed carcasses, which may lead to further deaths from speeding vehicles until the carcass is safely disposed away from the road.

As roads become wider and busier, the number of animals crossing and the rate of roadkill usually increases, but beyond a point it may actually begin to decrease [12]. This usually happens when roads become four-laned highways or expressways catering to tens of thousands of vehicles every day. The reduction may be due to the decimation of wildlife populations along the road as well as a ‘barrier’ effect, where many animals actively avoid the road and avoid crossing it [13]. A road like this passing through a forest or key natural habitat essentially cleaves it into two pieces. For many species, this is an added fragmentation of an already fragmented habitat [14].

Impact of ecological changes

In addition, roads are now well known to cause various ecological changes, leading to a wide range of impacts including many, often unnoticed, detrimental effects on wildlife [15]. The disturbance associated with roads and the opening created by the road corridor does favour some species; unfortunately, these are mostly undesirable ones. Alien weeds spread along roads using them as highways to invade into ecosystems [16]. The exposure along the road dessicates and dries vegetation, making it more prone to fires. Trees are more exposed, too, and may fall due to high wind speeds along the road or suffer from stress related to altered ecology. All of these contribute to permanent and chronic changes in the environment and habitat, thereby affecting wildlife and ecosystem health.

Yet, this is only a small part of the story. No study has yet comprehensively addressed all animal taxa from invertebrates such as snails and ants to large creatures such as peafowl and elephants. Even the studies carried out so far may underestimate the true damage. Many animals are struck and badly wounded by vehicles along roads but manage to flee or drag themselves away from the road corridor to die unseen and unrecorded by researchers some distance away. It is not unusual for road-killed animals to be removed off the road or consumed by scavengers, including people, and thereby the kills go unrecorded. Even when dead animals on the road are noticed, other pervasive problems related to the road within forest areas are overlooked. This includes animals killed during road construction, earthwork and annual maintenance operations, particularly slow-moving and burrowing species such as turtles, snakes, and soil fauna.

Poor data on forest roads

No study has yet even catalogued the extent of roads through natural areas, especially forests, across India or the loss of forest cover due to roads. A notable exception, from Garo Hills in Meghalaya, showed that just in this region the 456 ha of biodiversity-rich forest was lost to roads between 1971 and 1991 [17]. Another long-term aspect is the issue of increased access: people moving in and settling or polluting otherwise remote areas.

While more studies on road ecology are required in India, there is also urgent need to use existing information and experiences from other countries to begin to reduce and avoid this carnage [18]. This requires the immediate attention and close coordination of ministries and departments related to roads and forests (or other natural ecosystems). Most important, it requires the attention of the citizen, the casual driver, the tourist—particularly the vehicle-based ‘eco-tourist’—whose individual initiative, sensitivity, and care could save thousands of animal lives.

A range of measures could help remedy the situation. Some are merely engineered quick-fixes that can help in certain locations or in the short-term, such as artificial ‘canopy bridges’ for movement of arboreal mammals [19]. Other measures include proper deployment of speed breakers in roads through forests, creation of underpasses and overpasses that are well-designed keeping in mind the ecology and behaviour of the species whose mortality rate is sought to be mitigated. Signboards informing people to look out for and allow wildlife to cross and measures to check overspeeding may also be implemented. Such short-term measures, if implemented based on research that has identified roadkill ‘hotspots’ can have very positive effects. For example, the installation of just four speed-bumps along 1.5 km of highway passing through a forest in Zanzibar, helped reduced the mortality of threatened red colobus monkeys by 85% in first nine months itself. Prior to this, every year, vehicles used to kill 15% of the colobus monkey population living near the road [20]. Slowing down vehicles at key locations is a very crucial aspect that reduces likelihood of road kill while providing greater reaction time for drivers and animals to evade a collision.

Longer-term and more sustained measures require a deeper understanding of the landscape through which roads pass and a greater sensitivity to the species we share this world with. The number, extent, and width of roads passing through forests and wetlands should be strictly regulated. Improvements to the quality of the road surface and adequate signages should be the emphasis for driver comfort and safety, not increasing the number of lanes or width of the road or the speed with which vehicles can traverse these crucial stretches. As there is virtually no understanding of these issues among planners, land managers, and the wider public, despairing conservationists today regard narrow, bad roads as a great boon, one that is surpassed only by the complete absence of roads.

Encourage vegetation growth

A key long-term measure is to encourage natural vegetation on either side of the road. Currently, vast amounts of public money is wasted in slashing all vegetation on either side of thousands of kilometres of road, with the spurious claim that this improves visibility or makes the road safer. In fact, dense weed growth rapidly chokes up the opened spaces on roadsides, replacing more pleasing and open, natural, native vegetation. In forest areas where tree cover would have naturally shaded out weed growth—performing a public service at no cost and with considerable aesthetic benefits—the opened spaces with obnoxious weed growth now represent a wasteful annual cost of repeated slashing in the guise of road maintenance. The lack of any understanding that good, stable, and safe roads really need consideration of ecological aspects as well, is one of the glaring failings of the government and road construction companies.

An example of a good forest road, used even by trucks and buses, with unbroken canopy over the road. Photo: NCF

The design and adoption of regulations is urgently needed. Forest roads should mandatorily retain and maintain tree canopy connectivity over the road. Where such connectivity has been lost, at a minimum, for every 200 metres of road, a 50-m-wide stretch needs to be marked off with signs and speed breakers and the tree canopy with overlapping branches re-established overhead. Efforts to establish and maintain such stretches should begin as a top priority along all roads through our wildlife sanctuaries, national parks, tiger reserves, reserved forests, and their buffer zones.

Guidelines need to be involved keeping specific species and landscape considerations in mind. For instance, in tropical forests of equatorial Africa, the home of the highly endangered great apes (gorillas and chimpanzees), the IUCN has prepared best-practice guidelines on a range of issues, including road planning [21]. This includes recommendations to plan roads at least 5 km away from protected area boundaries, reduce road width of primary roads to less than 7.5 m (less than 12.5 m including graded portion and shoulders) and width of secondary roads to less than 4.5 m (8.5 m including shoulders), avoiding road construction in closed-canopy forests, minimising the number of secondary roads, and re-using old roads rather than build new roads. There has been some effort to develop such guidelines in India [22], but there is much more to be done.

Forest areas around the world, including in India, are transected by a large number of old, unused, and unnecessary roads (e.g., old logging coupe roads, roads built during dam construction, or as ‘game’ roads for hunting). It is time to undo the damage wrought by these roads by actively removing these roads and ecologically restoring natural vegetation. Although the methods available for road removal may cause some short-term disturbance, research has clearly established the conservation benefits in the medium- and long-term [23].

An overarching need, although perhaps the most difficult one, is the sensitisation and involvement of individual drivers. A vast majority of drivers probably have no deliberate will to kill animals. They presumably have no wish to cause lasting harm to the environment or to the public exchequer by insisting on roads made and managed by ecologically illiterate and insensitive agencies. When individuals become aware and begin to care it can have two useful effects. As drivers, they can adopt more responsible driving practices, watch out for and respect animal crossings, and avoid other unsavoury practices such as feeding animals by roadsides. This, as a direct contribution, can help save hundreds to thousands of animal lives over an average driver’s lifetime. Second, by example, by persuasion, or ultimately by their vote in a ballot box, they can indirectly influence others to save thousands of lives, minimise ecological damage, help to improve roads, and make the driving experience along roads through natural areas infinitely more pleasant. When the paths of people and animals cross, each can then go their own way, leaving behind not a flattened carcass but the memory of a pleasant encounter.

Footnotes

[1] Economic Survey 2007-2008, Ministry of Finance, Government of India. Link accessed 17 April 2009.

[2] Singh, S. K. (2008) CO2 emissions from passenger transport in India: 1950-51 to 2020-21. Proceedings of the Better Air Quality 2008 Workshop, Bangkok, Thailand. Link accessed 17 April 2009.

[3] Chhangani, A. K. (2004) Frequency of avian road-kills in Kumbhalgarh Wildlife Sanctuary, Rajasthan, India. Forktail 20: 110-111.

Kumara, H. N., Sharma, A. K., Kumar, M. A., and Singh, M. (2000) Roadkills of wild fauna in Indira Gandhi wildlife sanctuary, Western Ghats, India: implications for management. Biosphere Conservation 3: 41-47.

Sundar, K. S. G. (2004). Mortality of herpetofauna, birds and mammals due to vehicular traffic in Etawah district, Uttar Pradesh, India. Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society 101: 392-398.

Radhakrishna,S. Goswami, A. B. and Sinha , A. (2006) Distribution and Conservation of Nycticebus bengalensis in Northeastern India. International Journal of Primatology 27: 971-982.

Areendran, G. and Pasha, M. K. S. (2000) Gaur Ecology Project, Report, Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun.

Johnsingh, A. J. T., Sankar, K. and Mukherjee, S. (1997) Saving prime tiger habitat in Sariska Tiger Reserve. Cat News 27: 3-4.

[4] Rao, R. S. P. and Girish, M. K. S. (2007) Road kills: Assessing insect casualties using flagship taxon. Current Science 92: 830-837.

[5] Vijayakumar, S. P., Vasudevan, K. and Ishwar, N. M. (2001) Herpetofaunal mortality on roads in the Anamalai Hills, southern Western Ghats. Hamadryad 26: 265–272.

[6] Eigenbroda, F. Hecnarb, S. J., Fahrig , L. (2008) The relative effects of road traffic and forest cover on anuran populations. Biological Conservation 141: 35–46.

[7] Gibbs, J. P. and Shriver, W. G. (2005) Can road mortality limit populations of pool-breeding amphibians? Wetlands Ecology and Management 13: 281–289 .

[8] Horváth, G., Kriska, G., Malik, P. and Robertson , B. (2009) Polarized light pollution: a new kind of ecological photopollution. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 7; doi:10.1890/080129.

[9] Robertson, B. A. and Hutto, R. L. (2006) A framework for understanding ecological traps and an evaluation of existing evidence. Ecology 87: 1075-1085.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_traps

[10] Radhakrishnan, S. and Singh, M. (2002) Conserving the Slender Loris (Loris lydekkerianus lydekkerianus). Pages 227-231, National Seminar on Conservation of Eastern Ghats, March 24- 26, 2002, held at Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh; personal observations.

[11] Hockings, K. J., Anderson, J. R., Matsuzawa, T. (2006). Road crossing in chimpanzees: A risky business. Current Biology 16: R668-670. Watch movie here.

Blake, S., Deem, S. L., Strindberg, S., Maisels, F., Momont, L. Isia, I., Douglas-Hamilton, I.,Karesh, W. B., Kock, M. D. (2008) Roadless wilderness area determines forest elephant movements in the Congo Basin. PLoS ONE 3(10): e3546. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0003546

[12] Seiler, A. (2003) The toll of the automobile: wildlife and roads in Sweden. PhD thesis. Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala. Link accessed 11 Feb 2009.

[13] Laurance, S. G. and Gomez, M. S. (2005) Clearing width and movements of understory rainforest birds. Biotropica 37: 149–152.

Laurance, S. G., Stouffer, P. C. and Laurance, W. F. (2004) Effects of road clearings on movement patterns of understory rainforest birds in Central Amazonia. Conservation Biology 18: 1099–1109.

Goosem, M. (2001) Effects of tropical rainforest roads on small mammals: inhibition of crossing movements. Wildlife Research 28: 351–364.

[14] Goosem, M. (2007) Fragmentation impacts caused by roads through rainforests. Current Science 93: 1587-1595.

See also this article by Rhett Butler on roads as enablers of rainforest destruction.

[15] Noss, R. The ecological effects of roads. Link accessed 17 April 2009;

Spellerberg , I. F. (1998) Ecological effects of roads and traffic: a literature review. Global Ecology and Biogeography Letters 7: 317-333;

Forman, R. T. T. and Alexander, L. E. (1998) Roads and their major ecological effects. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 29:207-231;

Trombulak, S. C. and Frissell, C. A. (2000) Review of ecological effects of roads on terrestrial and aquatic communities. Conservation Biology 14: 18-30;

Donaldson A. and Bennett A. (2004) Ecological effects of roads: implications for the internal fragmentation of Australian parks and reserves. Parks Victoria Technical Series No. 12. Parks Victoria, Melbourne.

Fahrig, L., and Rytwinski, T. (2009) Effects of roads on animal abundance: an empirical review and synthesis. Ecology and Society 14(1): 21.

[16] Gelbard, J. L. and Belnap, J. (2003) Roads as conduits for exotic plant invasions in a semiarid landscape. Conservation Biology 17: 420–432.

[17] Bera, S. K., Basumatary, S. K., Agarwal, A. and Ahmed, M. (2006) Conversion of forest land in Garo Hills, Meghalaya for construction of roads: a threat to the environment and biodiversity. Current Science 91: 281–284.

[18] Forman, R. T. T., Sperling, D., Bissonette, J., Clevenger, A., Cutshall, C., Dale, V., Fahrig, L., France, R., Goldman, C., Heanue, K., Jones, J., Swanson, F., Turrentine, T., Winter, T. (2002) Road Ecology: Science and Solutions. Island Press, Washington, D. C. Read review here.

http://www.wildlifeandroads.org

http://www.peopleandwildlife.org.uk/biblio.shtml#road

[19] Weston, N. (2002) Why did the ringtail cross the road? Using Rainforest Research, Cooperative ResearchCentre for Tropical Rainforest Ecology and Management, Australia.

Goosem, M., Izumi, Y. and Turton, S. (2001) Will underpasses below roads restore habitat connectivity for tropical rainforest fauna? Ecological Management and Restoration 2: 196–202. See also this article about faunal underpasses.

Laurance, W. F., Goosem, M. and Laurance, S. G. W. (in press) Impacts of roads and linear clearings on tropical forests. Trends in Ecology and Evolution in press.

[20] The Zanzibar Red Colobus Monkey: behavior, ecology, and conservation. DVD documentary, T. T. Struhsaker, Department of Biological Anthropology and Anatomy, Duke University, USA.

[21] Morgan, D. and Sanz, C. (2007) Best practice guidelines for reducing the impact of commercial logging on great apes in Western Equatorial Africa. IUCN SSC Primate Specialist Group (PSG), Gland, Switzerland. 32 pp.

[22] Rajvanshi, A., Mathur, V. B., Teleki, G. C., Mukherjee, S. K. (2001) Roads, sensitive habitats and wildlife: environmental guidelines for India and South Asia. Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun.

[23] Switalski, T. A., Bissonette, J. A., DeLuca, T. H., Luce, C. H. and Madej, M. A. (2004) Benefits and impacts of road removal. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 2: 21-28.

A bird's eye view of Hollongapar Gibbon Wildife Sanctuary (Courtesy: Google Earth)

A death trap…

This railway track is an important one that connects several important commercial towns of upper Assam (Dibrugarh, Tinsukia, Digboi and Duliajan) to Guwahati and the rest of India. It was laid down during the 1930s basically to streamline the transportation of tea, coal, oil and important timbers from upper Assam to Guwahati. In this process the Hollongapar Gibbon Wildlife Sanctuary  became fragmented into two unequal chunks of forests. In addition to scores of other problems, this track has always posed a major threat to the wildlife of this isolated and fragmented 20.98 km2 sanctuary, most popularly known for its staggering primate community and possibly one of the highest primate density areas in the world.

Hollongapar Gibbon Wildlife Sanctuary showing the railway track in between two compartments (Courtest: Google Earth)

During one of the field-days, when I was venturing into the forest, I saw a troop of capped langurs feeding on the ripe fruits of Hoanlu (Litsea monopetala), a few of them on the tree and the rest on the ground along the railway line. On my way back in the evening, I hit upon something on the track. It was the carcass of a sub-adult capped langur, one of the members of the same troop that I saw feeding in the morning. This unfortunate individual probably forgot that speed is not its forte while on the ground.

A capped langur hit by a running train

For primates like the arboreal hoolock gibbon, which never descends to the forest floor, this track is an extreme barrier. There are three groups of hoolock gibbons, consisting of 11 individuals, which have been trapped in the smaller forest chunk of about 2 km2 (Compartment 1, as it is administratively known) of the sanctuary. Assuming that the population was trapped after the construction of railway line (in the 1930s) and the fact that the patch was already dismembered from the contiguous forest at the time of the construction, the gibbons are probably fighting their battle of survival in the patch for last 80 years!

The railway track

Amongst the other primates, the most terrestrial stump-tailed macaque and possibly the nocturnal slow loris never cross this track; this means that the resources readily available across the railway track always remains inaccessible to them. Only the rhesus macaque, owing to its mastery over ‘terrestrial matters’ is able to manage this deadly trap and a herd of 30-40 residential elephants perhaps! This herd crosses this track almost on a regular basis. Although it is heartening to know that no elephant death has ever been reported here, the credit for this must go to the elephant’s instincts, honed over million years of evolution, rather than to the lethargic forest department or the mindless train drivers for whom speed is too much to resist even as the track is dotted with elephant corridor signboards.

Death Trap-Rhesus macaque crossing the railway track

Besides these conspicuous and so-called ‘enigmatic’ animals, whose deaths invariably make news, there are numerous reptiles, amphibians and insects whose deaths go completely unnoticed, unannounced, forgotten. Even a causal walk along the track and you stumble upon the disfigured remains of hundreds of animal bodies scattered all around.

A rock python hit by a running train (Photo courtesy: Parimal Ch.Ray)

…and another

Meleng-Madhupur road

Besides the railway track, a road that runs through the sanctuary is another threat taking its toll on the wildlife of the sanctuary. This three kilometer road connects four villages adjacent to the sanctuary with the neighbouring Mariani town clogged with vehicles throughout the day. Recently this ‘deplorable’ road was repaired and was given a facelift to make it much ‘smoother’. It’s extremely agonizing to watch the reckless drivers testing their driving skills on it at a breakneck speed. The canopy above the road is wide open and it is frequently observed that arboreal primates and squirrels struggle to cross this gap. For reptiles and amphibians, crossing this gap of forest is not that an easy task, many lost their life in such attempts.

An unfortunate victim of road kill

Road ahead

Roads, railways and other linear infrastructures have made a pervasive incursion in most of the forest causing mortality of wildlife, severely disrupting animal movement, reduce the amount and quality of habitat and increase the risk of local extinction. The effect of these structures on the wildlife in some cases is glaring whereas in many it is very subtle.
To mitigate the problem of road kill and increase the permeability of roads to wildlife, management agencies and conservation organization are seeking engineering solutions. There is now an increasing use of rope bridge overpasses and various underpasses in providing connectivity to rainforest fauna worldwide.
Taking cue from such practices, the Assam Forest Department has been trying to construct two overpasses across the track in collaboration with the railways. Two steel ropes (wrapped in green plastic cover) were thus laid down over the track thus connecting two compartments. It was of course expected that the gibbons would use them and life would be fine again. It, however, just didn’t work. Nobody knows why or has made the effort to find out why. Probably the steel ropes were too artificial a lure for them. Now there is a plan to construct a full-fledged bridge over the tracks. Will this work? Nobody, of course, knows.
A similar effort was attempted in the Borajan fragment of the Bherjan-Borajan-Podumoni Wildlife Sanctuary in Assam with limited success. Canopy bridges of bamboo poles were placed in the canopy openings inside the forest. Interestingly, hoolock gibbons, capped langurs and Assamese macaques have used these canopy bridges whereas the pigtailed and rhesus macaques have never.
The feasibility of using bamboo as bridges on the long run is questionable owing to the fragile nature of the bamboo, which tends to decay over time and become a liability rather than a solution. However, it must be recognized that natural connections rather than artificial structures are more likely to be preferred by rainforest species.
The problem of roadkills is not going to go away any time soon. We need this important infrastructure for it brings with it development but we also need wildlife to be free from this threat. Our prime concern should be never to plan for roads that run through important wildlife habitats and divert the existing ones whenever possible. Even if cannot do so much, we should modify their use in certain ways, as for example, banning their use at times when roadkills are most likely. The importance of such measures for conservation and wildlife management is invaluable.

The Anamalai landscape showing Vazhachal Forest Division and the adjoining Protected Areas (dark green)

Rainforests extend as far as the eye can see. The twin peaks of Karimala Gopuram (in Parambikulam Wildlife Sanctuary) are visible in the distance while the Lower Sholayar reservoir is seen in the foreground

I first visited Vazhachal in February 2008 with some of our Western Ghats research team comprising Raghunath and Drs. A.J.T. Johnsingh and M.D. Madhusudan. We approached from Chalakudy and reached the Forest Rest House near the Athirapally falls by late afternoon. The Chalakudy river negotiates big rocks at Athirapally and cascades down in three big plumes. This water then rushes down in a torrent just outside the rest house before continuing its journey through the Vazhachal forests. Even inside the rest house, the muffled roar of the water is always audible. We were surveying the Parambikulam – Vazhachal region to assess the status of the habitat for large mammals. The next day we intended to drive to Valparai but in the interim, we decided that it would be worth taking a short night drive to see if we could spot some wildlife. Soon after we left the falls, we ran into a herd of four elephants with a small calf. Startled by the sudden appearance of our headlights, the pachyderms were decidedly nervous, pondering whether to cross the road or bide their time, their jerky movements and staccato trumpeting reflecting their mood. Vinod, the Forest Guard who had been assigned to accompany us, muttered nervously as we crawled forward. Without warning, a lone motorcyclist came around a bend from the opposite direction and, unaware of the danger lurking a few feet away, passed within arm’s length of the herd. The elephants appeared taken aback which is probably why they did not react. As one of us used a flashgun, the elephants started in alarm, making Vinod mumble frenziedly, convinced of an imminent fatal charge. The matriarch moved towards us truculently while the others closed protectively around the calf. We were forced to reverse the vehicle around 300 m, where we switched off the headlights and watched in silence for a quarter of an hour as the herd crossed in the moonlight.

The Chalakudy river cascading past the Forest Rest House

Along this road to Vazhachal, there is hardly a spot where elephant signs are not visible. They are everywhere in the form of fresh and old dung, strips of bark ripped off tree trunks, broken and twisted reed culms and occasionally, the strong unmistakable smell of elephants close at hand albeit out of sight. On several occasions, I have been stopped by nervous bikers, inquiring about the presence of elephants on the road I had just passed through. Nilgiri langurs are also ubiquitous along this stretch of forest, the silence being frequently punctuated by their joyous whoomps. At any point along the route, if one waits a while in silence, there is a fair chance that one will spot a troop feeding or cavorting in the canopy. The Vazhachal forests are also rich in hornbills, with all four species of peninsular India, the Malabar grey, Indian grey, Malabar pied and great hornbills reportedly occurring. Other than the Indian grey hornbill, I have had quite a few sightings of each of the other three species in these forests. The resonating calls and booming wing beats of great hornbills are also frequently audible here. I remember one evening drive being particularly fruitful, when we saw seven Nilgiri langur troops and a solitary great hornbill before dusk and 13 sambar, a porcupine, two sloth bears and two leopards by the time we reached the rest house at around 8:00 PM. I have also seen the southern birdwing, India’s largest butterfly species, here.

Once when going to a tribal settlement located near this road, I came across a group of Kadar tribals accompanied by around 20 dogs of all sizes, colours and ages. This was obviously a hunting party. The tribesmen initially denied that they were out on a hunt but under friendly questioning aided by copious quantities of biscuits and peanut candy, finally admitted that they would catch small animals such as monitor lizards, hares and mouse deer if they chanced upon them. Without a doubt, such a large pack of dogs would have had no problem in bringing down even large-bodied species such as the sambar. Hunting is a major threat for wildlife in Kerala and has resulted in the “empty forest” syndrome in many parts of the state where habitat exists but wildlife populations have largely been decimated. Although the tribal population may be hunting in a more sustainable manner by meeting only their immediate consumption needs, it is a moot point as to whether the same can be said of the local settlers who have immigrated from other parts of Kerala and from neighbouring Tamil Nadu to take up residence in and around these forests.

Regrettably, the continued existence of this road in its present state has been jeopardized by a proposal for its widening and upgradation into a National Highway connecting Pollachi in Tamil Nadu with Chalakudy. It does not need much imagination to think of the disastrous consequences of increased traffic volumes and associated human activities on this pristine habitat and its fauna. However, the most serious threat to the existence of the Vazhachal forests is the Athirapally Hydroelectric Project, a 163 megawatt project that was proposed by the Kerala State Electricity Board in 1994. The Government of Kerala is proceeding with this proposal to build a dam five kilometres upstream of the Athirapally falls and 400 m upstream of the Vazhachal rapids at a cost of Rs. 675 crore. However, environmental groups have opposed the project on grounds that the dam will require the diversion of forest land, elephant corridors will be cut off, the picturesque Athirapally waterfalls may eventually fade into insignificance, people downstream of the dam may not get enough drinking water and the composition of the fish fauna of the Chalakudy river will be altered. The Athirapally area recently came into prominence with the discovery of Lagenandra nairii, a new species of fish. Besides, Gymnema khandalense, a rare medicinal plant earlier thought to be restricted to the Sahayadri region of the northern Western Ghats, reportedly occurs here. The Athirapally River Forum, supported by other NGOs, has filed a petition against the construction of this dam in the Kerala High Court. Over harvesting of reeds (Ochlandra sp.) to the tune of 200 metric tonnes annually, human encroachments of forest land, penstock pipelines disrupting connectivity for terrestrial mammals and high-tension powerlines disrupting canopy contiguity for arboreal mammals are some of the other threats to the forests of Vazhachal.

The magnificent Athirapally falls are in danger of drying up

Penstock pipelines deter the movements of terrestrial mammals

Much of the Vazhachal forests are due to be added as a buffer to the proposed Parambikulam Tiger Reserve. This is certainly a blessing since only its inclusion as a Critical Tiger Habitat will prevent the exploitation of these forests, a very important stretch for the movement of elephants and also among the best established breeding habitats for Malabar pied and great hornbills in the Western Ghats. However, much time has passed and the final notification of Parambikulam Tiger Reserve is still pending owing to ongoing boundary disputes and negotiations. In the interest of conservation, it is imperative that a decision be reached soon.

On a humorous note, I was once unable to procure a room in one of the rest houses in Vazhachal due to tourist bookings and was forced to spend a night in a Forest Department dormitory. Although the rest houses are well maintained, the same cannot be said of the dormitories which have fallen into a state of disrepair and resemble haunted buildings. Fortunately, I was accompanied by Sasi, my trusty field assistant, that night. We retired early after a simple dinner at a local stall. The rooms were stuffy, there was no electricity and the musty mattresses were riddled with gaping holes and crawling with bedbugs. We dragged a couple of the relatively better-looking mattresses onto the verandah, closed the collapsible gate in case an elephant or a leopard decided to pay a visit and dozed off. Sometime later, I was woken by a sensation of something nibbling at my toes. A flash of my torch revealed a large black rat. My yell of disgust awoke Sasi, who started shouting frantically from the other end of the verandah, certain that something was attacking me. We did not sleep thereafter, and spent the rest of the night swatting bedbugs and watching out for rats. At daybreak we hit the road again with alacrity, the invigorating air refreshing us within a few minutes.

Will these forests remain this way? For the future of the tiger and elephant in the southern Western Ghats, it is imperative that they do

Map Lingti valley

‘Lingti’ is an instrument that cuts rock, as it literally means in Spitian. The rapidly flowing white water of the glacial melt has carved a deep gorge through an otherwise rolling steppe landscape, thus probably the name. The river cuts a narrow gorge with towering rock faces along both banks. These rocky steep banks rise up, almost near vertical, until it reaches the edge of the plateau. Here the valley suddenly opens up into a flat dish of rolling hills. The plateau stretches in all directions until it approaches the ridge-line fence created by the mountains all around the valley. Here the rolling hills immediately start rising and turn into massive rock and ice slopes leading to the top of the various mountains peaks and ridges.

The sharp walls of the Lingti gorge

Lingti valley is surely a mountaineers paradise. But due to the remoteness of this valley few mountaineers venture here. The first outsiders to visit this valley was an expedition led by Harish Kapadia in 1983. They managed to penetrate the valley halfway and then turned their attention towards Cho-cho Khang Nilda and surrounding peaks. The same expedition returned in 1987 and managed to reach the source of Lingti and even climb Parilungbi. Since then hardly any expeditions have come this way. Recently Gya was climbed from this side by another Indian expedition, but overall very few have made it this far.

At the same time Lingti is a geologist’s goldmine too. It is a living museum that has preserved over 250 million years of geological history in the form of shales and fossils. The ammonite and belemnite fossils from here are known world over. Many theories are based on the geological studies carried out here. Fossils collected by Dr. Richard Hey in 1955 are still preserved at the Sedgwick Museum in Cambridge. But, little was know about the wildlife of this remote valley until very recently. Till the last decade most of our knowledge about the wildlife of this valley came from the anecdotes reported by adventurers and mountaineers who visited this area. In mid 1980’s this valley was notified as part of the Kibber Wildlife Sanctuary.

This region is so remote that there is not a single village in about 400 km2 of the upper habitable part of this valley. Historically there was a village called ‘Uhlshikpo’ within this valley, which moved out due to its remoteness around 80-100 years ago. Now only the ruins of ‘Uhlshikpo remain inside the valley. Although this valley is along the border with Tibet there are no passes crossing from Lingti to Tibet and so this region has received relatively little attention from Army or the Border Police Force, except for some routine patrols.

The ruins of Uhlshikpo

Last year, I got the opportunity to survey this hidden valley and prepare a plan for the management of this valley for the conservation of its wildlife wealth. This exercise was a part of the collaborative effort between Himachal Pradesh Forest Department and Nature Conservation Foundation on Management planning of the region. The task had to begin from documenting what wildlife existed inside Lingti, then assessing its status and recommending suitable interventions for its long-term survival. This survey was to be a tough challenge. Along with difficult terrain there was also the thunderous rock cutting river torrent. To get into Lingti one requires crossing the river many times. It meant that for any kind of survey we had to wait till the water was at its lowest. I decided to attempt this in late autumn and early winter. At the beginning of winter the water level in the river goes down and ice bridges are formed all across the river making the river crossing relatively easier. But, the early winter cold makes camping in the open a miserable experience.

Crossing the Lingti

I needed a tough team for this kind of a survey. The members not only had to be physically extremely fit but also knowledgeable about conducting wildlife surveys. They had to be able to identify animals based on their signs such as droppings and spoors (footprints in soft soil or snow) and be able to use technical equipment such as Global Positioning System (GPS). I found such knowledgeable and fit people in the Kibber Youth Council. The Kibber Youth Council had been helping us (Nature Conservation Foundation) with wildlife conservation programs in the main Spiti valley for over ten years. The team members were Sushil, Kalzang, Thillay, Kalzang Pulzor, Chudim, Rinchen, Sheru, Thukten and myself.

We began our survey from Lalung (3776m); a village located very close to the confluence of Lingti and Spiti. With a population of about 370 people and 55 houses Lalung is a largish village by Spitian Standard. I wasn’t surprised to know that very few people from this village had ever been inside the Lingti Valley. As metal roads and electricity penetrated deep into the mountains and reached this village, their lifestyle changed dramatically. People became more market dependent; selling their crop of pea and buying the grocery from stores in Kaza (the administrative headquarter of Spiti) became the norm of life. No more is there a need for them to go deep inside Lingti valley to graze their livestock or find wood to make the plough or building. While we heard tales of snow leopards and blue sheep from the valley we got little credible information.

The team:(from left to right) Thukten II, Kalzang, Thukten, Kulbhushan, Kalzang Pulzor, Chudim, Rinchen, Thillay, Sheru

It was time for the actual survey. Thukten II the herder from Lalung was hired as our guide. The trek to Phiphuk, the center of the valley, was arduous; we kept walking over the frozen bed of the Lingti but occasionally the ice sheet under our feet became too thin for comfort and we had to hop from one boulder to another. At the same time, all of us were top heavy, carrying ration for 15 days of stay and thus progress was extremely slow. The first day we camped at Kibri. Before the last light of the day our spirits were rejuvenated as we spotted a herd of 20 blue sheep grazing on the steep banks nearby. The second day of trek was full of excitement as we kept encountering fresh snow leopard pugmarks all along the trail. We kept expecting a surprise at every bend in the trail. That evening we reached ‘Phiphuk’ (4005m). We decided to make this our base camp due to its central location in the valley. This was to be our home for the next two weeks. The prospects seemed very promising; we had seen many snow leopard signs around the base-camp itself and even sighted a few blue sheep nearby.

Over the next few days we split into three teams of three each and systematically surveyed every side valley and plateau. The first couple of days our team comprising of Sushil, Kalzang Pulzor and myself surveyed the areas around Lakshithang (4560m) and Saktichen (4530m). During these days we would cross the Kuli la (4880m) every day to reach the survey area but it was worth the effort as we encountered over 100 blue sheep in this region. We surveyed the area up to Chaksachen La (5230m) beyond this we knew that the habitat was not very conducive for any mammal. While our team toiled up to Kuli la-Saktichen and back every day other teams fought their way to high pastures of Sheru (4500m), ‘Uhlshipo ruins’ and Syarma la (4767m). During the day all three teams would head out with GPS and notebook in hand but come evening we would huddle together in the tiny camp and share the days experience. The tiny camp and the huddling helped us stay warm.

The last area to be surveyed was the Syarma nala. We decided to survey it on our way back. The day we wrapped up from Phiphuk our team broke camp early and headed for Syarma nala. We had the huge task of covering the whole Syarma nala in one day. Effectively it meant walking over 35 km in a day. The distance felt even longer in the thin air and cold at that altitude. By evening we were proud of what we had done. We had surveyed the whole area and confirmed the presence of at least 108 blue sheep in that area. But the biggest prize of the day was to encounter pugmarks of a mother and cub snow leopard.

Blue sheep

Late evening the three of us reached the place that the others had chosen for the days camp. It was a tiny cave along the frozen river and a little sand bank separating the river from the cave mouth. Tired with a hard days work Sushil, Kalzang and me were the first to get into our sleeping bags. But soon the tiny cave became suffocating and claustrophobic; partly because there were ten of us trying to squeeze inside the tiny cave. Finally Sushil and I gave up; we picked up our sleeping bags and came under the stars on the sand bank. The sky was clear and the night extremely cold. We spread our sleeping bags next to the frozen river and tried to sleep. It was the coldest night of my life. I dozed on and off but couldn’t sleep. I watched the stars drift by softly. ‘Cygnus’ – The Swan, ‘Pegasus’, ‘Andromeda’, ‘Taurus’-The Bull, ‘Orion’-the Hunter all the star constellations passed by slowly. I kept wishing that a snow leopard would pass by but even if it did I wouldn’t have seen it in the dark. And then there was a faint glow in the eastern sky. While it was still soft glow Kalzang brew some tea. We all sat around the cooking fire huddled together discussing the night. When suddenly we heard a movement. All of strained our eye to see what made the sound; secretly wishing it to be a snow leopard. It was a stone marten, a great sighting nevertheless. In fact all of us had seen the snow leopard more number of times than a stone marten. Although stone martens are common in other parts of the world they are relatively rare here. It was only my second time. A great farewell from Lingti. The next day we came back to Lalung.

'Orion'-The Hunter

During the survey, together we encountered hundreds of snow leopard pugmarks, scrapes and feces. Based on the signs, we cannot estimate the number of snow leopards but we could conclusively say that there was a healthy population of snow leopards in the valley. Also there seemed to be a healthy prey base for the snow leopard based on the good population of the blue sheep. We encountered over 350 blue sheep (counted without repetition). We also came across more than 10 carcasses of blue sheep killed by snow leopards. Throughout the survey we never encountered signs of Tibetan wolves. Although a few people from Lalung said that they had, in the past, seen wolves inside the Lingti Valley, I was skeptical of these reports as the habitat in much of Lingti is not suitable for an open country species such as wolf. Apart from a healthy prey-predator system (snow leopard-blue sheep) we also encountered other smaller mammals such as the red fox, woolly hare, pika and the very rare stone marten.

Woolly hare

The survey information and our interaction with the villagers of Lalung formed the core of the management plan for this region. Lingti promises to be the long-term future for the survival of the snow leopard and other rare wildlife of the high Himalaya. The villagers of Lalung also take pride in being the guardians of Lingti. All throughout it was a satisfying experience to unfold the mysteries of the Lingti Valley.

Sushil and Thukten II with evidence of blue sheep presence

Photographs by Kamolika

A bizarre encounter with a couple of wild dogs recently etched an indelible mark on my mind. Wild dogs are generally known to be averse to human presence. But our recent encounter with this beautiful canid is bit different. Commonly, naturalists and wildlife photographers take pains to watch them from a distance and photograph them. But this time, roles were swapped. It was their turn now. They watched us …..from a distance.

This anecdote goes two-three weeks back when the rain gods had mercy and Valparai got a breather from the heavy showers that engulfed it during the past one month. It was a sunny day with intermittent showers and the weather seemed perfect for a long drive. We unanimously decided to undertake a long drive and zeroed in on Shekalmudi as the destination, at a distance of about 30 kilometres from Valparai.

We passed through several tea estates, stopping for brief photography sessions on the way. At Solayar dam, we topped to catch a quick bite. Post-lunch we crossed a small market place after the dam and just when we were out of its din and entering the tea estate again, we caught sight of a wild dog sitting on the edge of a tea garden.

The tea garden was about six feet above the level of the road and the mud around perfectly blended with its reddish brown coat but it was the green tea bushes in the background that gave it away. It was late in the afternoon, say 2.30 p.m. The wild dog was watchful and appeared to be on guard resting behind a stone. It was totally unprepared for our sudden intrusion. It must have seen many a passer by, but none who would stop and watch it and least of all pull out gadgets and click pictures.

Fearing it would flee at our unanticipated appearance, without much ado we clicked as many pictures of it as possible till the dog started becoming wary and uneasy at our presence and very reluctantly walked into the bushes. We peeked through the bushes lest we miss out on some other member of its pack, but there were none in the vicinity. Contemplating various reasons why a wild dog opted to sit at the edge of a tea garden looking out on the road, we hypothesized that probably there was a kill in the tea bushes yonder there which it was guarding. The air around was rent with a foul stench of dead meat, which further strengthened our supposition.

After the wild dog left, we decided to move on towards our original destination – Shekalmudi. Words cannot express our emotions after this extraordinary but pleasant meeting. It was indeed a close encounter with a wild dog, the closest we’ve had so far. The lush green around was mesmerizing. The silence of the hills was occasionally broken by the melodious song of the Malabar Whistling Thrush. A heavy but short-lived downpour mid-way and warning by a passing estate worker of poor road conditions due to a tree fall ahead prevented us from going any further. At the nearest suitable point we made an about turn and headed back. On the way back, we jokingly remarked that while returning, we must be on the lookout for the ‘wild doggies’. It was as if the wild dogs could read our mind. This time the sentinel encountered earlier was accompanied by a second one and both the wild dogs seem to maintain a strong vigilance.

Since we were on the lookout for them, they were easy to spot. They were lying apart from each other in the same place, where we had seen the first wild dog. The time elapsed between the first encounter and the second was roughly about an hour. While one withdrew into the bushes as soon as we stopped the car, the second one, which was perhaps, the one we had encountered first, refused to budge. While we both went berserk clicking as many pictures as possible, this wild dog sat there watching us intensely from its perch without batting an eyelid and with an expression of amusement that can best be described in the following words. “It is business as usual for us…but …who are these two intruders?”

We admit our guilt of intruding as unwanted visitors during the possible meal time of these two dogs but we assure you that their sight was irresistible and most nature lovers would choose to absolve us of this guilt.

After being contented that we had had as many pictures as possible, it was time to say farewell to the wild dog that had so patiently obliged us and kept us company without withdrawing. It had been nearly twenty minutes that the wild dog and we had been together and not for a moment did the wild dog shift its gaze from us. As we were getting ready to move, the silence was broken by sounds of laughter of children coming from a distance. The voices seemed to draw closer and a group of three to four school children came into sight. The wild dog twitched its ears, look towards the direction of the sound and with one last look at us, slowly but reluctantly retreated into the tea bushes.

Following closely on the heels of the school children was a stray dog. We feared that if it smelt the rotting meat, it might search for the source, which could give rise to a possible tiff between the wild dog and its domestic counterpart. We left the wild dog behind and moved on. About 50 metres away, in the adjacent garden, a group of female estate workers were busy engaged in plucking tea leaves. We volunteered to warn them about the presence of wild dogs nearby. They disclosed a surprising fact. They told us that the presence of wild dogs was not new to them. The spot was a regular haunt for these wild dogs that waited every afternoon for chicken waste to be dumped in the thick vegetation across the road. The waste was dumped by a broiler shop in the market nearby. The foul smell, which we earlier presumed was from a kill in fact emanated from the chicken waste.

Laughing at our own theory of wild dogs guarding their kill from stray dogs and other animals we moved from there. Once we were clear off the tea gardens and entered the crowded market place again, we saw an interesting signboard on a broiler chicken shop, which read as follows:

 ‘More taste, less waste’.