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!“

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.

After our trip to Bandhavgarh, in the middle of May, we traveled on into another special landscape. A landscape of stately sal forests spreading to the horizon, amidst sprawling meadows and plateaued hills. Here, everyday, a stage is set for a grand play of life and death. This is the land of the deer and the tiger, the quintessential prey and predator—a land that holds an essence of wild India. Kanha.

Kanha lies within a vast amphitheater marked by the sweep of the Satpura mountains to the west and the Maikal range to the east. The soils and rocks are ancient, seeming as old as the Earth herself—a piece of primeval Gondwana, the great land that sailed the primordial ocean. This is a land that gathers the waters for the Narmada river, flowing to the west, and the great Mahanadi, to the east. And here have lived the old peoples—the Gond, after whom the great land was named, and the Baiga, living off the ancient forests and the deep soils.

It is special, too, for both of us, being the landscape where George Schaller carried out his landmark study described in The Deer and the Tiger, a touchstone for wildlife researchers in India.

Kanha simmered in the summer heat and the monsoon was still some weeks away. Like green arms, the forests seemed to hug the browned meadows that awaited the rain to spur another renewal of life. Herds of gaur, heading for water and forage, added grandeur to the landscape.

In the grasslands, were herds of swamp deer, the so-called hard-ground barasingha, whose cousins of wetter turf one can see in the Terai grasslands of north and northeast India. The males, with handsome antlers and the relative calm that comes after the rutting season…

… and the females, prim and perfect, weaving their way through the meadows…

There are other deer, too, in Kanha: the diminutive and shy chevrotain, the cautious and excitable muntjac, the lithe and graceful chital, and that great deer of the forest, the sambar. The forests and grasslands resounded with the bellows of chital stags, for this was the peak season of their rut. We watched, as Schaller must have more than four decades ago, males displaying and sparring, pawing and preaching, fighting and mating.

Late one evening, we went up to the Bamhnidadar plateau, looking for another elusive ungulate, the four-horned antelope or chousingha. Although unlucky in this quest, we were treated to a panoramic view of the forests and meadows of Kanha. Along with the panorama of forests on view, the grand assemblages of ungulates on the meadows of Kanha must rank among the best wildlife spectacles on offer in India.

With the prey come the predators, engaged in the perpetual tussle of survival, the life-blood of ecology and evolution. There are tigers, of course, and in their shadow, so to speak, are leopards, wild dog, sloth bear, jackal, jungle cats, and other smaller and interesting carnivores. With the help of the langur and a little luck, we got to see some of them. On a drive through the forest, we stopped when we heard the alarm calls of langurs. We closely, and quietly, watched them as they closely, and noisily, watched something else moving through the forest.

Our patience was soon rewarded; as we watched, a leopard appeared at the edge of road and crossed over.

And later, a sloth bear with a grown cub…

and then, a delightful sighting of a jungle cat resting in the shade of a little rock overhang to escape the heat of the afternoon.

Jungle cat resting (Photo: Harsha J)

* * * * *

The sal forests swathe the landscape, and the Bauhinia climbers, bedecked with flowers, garland the sal.

Yet, the really large, tall trees are few. Here, perhaps, is a sad story of past logging slowly transforming into a future progression of hopeful regrowth. The tree trunks are studded with the gems of orchid blooms and shoulder the burdens of strangler figs. On the boughs, perch Racket-tailed Drongos, making their metallic calls. Their glistening black plumage and tail extend down thin streamers tipped  by black spatulae—the drongos, perched erect, attest the trees like exclamation marks.

And at the edge of the meadows, tall sal trees laden with fruit toss their branches to the wind that has come to carry their seed.

The drama of the deer and the tiger and the other wildlife will play on, on the evolutionary stage, and shall forever mark this landscape, here, in Central India. Yet, it is sobering to recall that the present assemblage of wildlife is but a truncated one, for the blackbuck, the buffalo, and the elephant, which roamed here not too long ago, not to mention the cheetah, are all seen no more.

We can despair at what we have lost, exult at what we can experience, and hope for what may be ahead—as we should, here, in the heart of India. And if you still do not believe that the heart of India is here, right here, in the great landscape of forests and meadows in and around Kanha, what can we say? See, for yourself!

The heart of India (Courtesy: Google Earth)

We thank Harsha J, Sarath C R, and Payal Mehta for their company and hospitality during our stay at the Banjaar Tola lodge.

Here in Central India, in the middle of May, the forests appear to be baking in the sun. The seasonal drought has turned many trees in the tropical forest nearly leafless and the grasslands are brown. The heat of summer is hard to escape, here, in the heart of India.

Finding water, is key. The deer make their daily beelines to the waterholes…

through the browned grasslands, unmindful, perhaps, of lesser predators, such as this jungle cat…

Although, it is good to be alert perhaps, when you reach a waterhole…

For a tiger may be waiting, nearby. This one, though, snoozing under the trees and the bamboo, behind a little rise and beyond our prying eyes, appears to be merely waving a disdainful paw.

The heart of India is tiger country. People come here to see tigers and be awed by their presence. They have learned that where there is water is a good place to wait to see a tiger. Some have learned to mark the tiger’s progress through the forest by the alarms of the deer, or the paw prints on the dusty roads. Others note that the tiger needs such a forest to exist. But, is this the main message from the heart of India? Don’t we need such a forest, too?

The heat is stunning and the soil is parched. And yet, the trees, as if knowing something we do not, or from habits derived over the ages, are putting out fresh green leaves. There has been no rain—only an anticipation of it. The mahua and the sal have fresh leaves, too, and the branches of the latter are laden with winged fruit. Perhaps there is an anticipation of wind, too. Even in this heat, as fields lie dry and fallow in the human countryside, the trees have found their moisture and are investing in growth, and in their future. And from the forest, the waters of the Charan Ganga continue to flow.

Deep in the forest, lies a great idol of Vishnu, the Sheshshaiya, a supreme deity signifying, pertinently, existence and preservation. The waters of the Charan Ganga appear to emerge from his feet. It is not hard to imagine, in a hot, dry summer as this, that a place from where springs clear water, which can keep the trees green here and for miles downstream, must have some divine origin.

A different perspective may obtain if one can emerge above the forest, high above, and soar on the wings of a vulture such as this one. Then one sees the vista of forest in the landscape around the spring where rests the Sheshshaiya.

From here, it seems it is the forest that taps, and soaks, and channels the water through aquifers to emerge as a spring. The forest is divine, in an aesthetic sense, but needs no divinity to perform this basic hydrologic function. Now, it seems that Vishnu, as a being signified by the idol, is but a wise person who, like the tiger, found a good place, close to water, to rest under the shade of the trees and the bamboo. His presence, as a preserver, is but a marker of what needs to be preserved.

* * * * *

The anticipation was not belied. The wind and rain were coming. As the day came to a dusky death, and as the jackal trotted away into the growing darkness of the evening…

… so did the clouds gather, with gusts of wind, thunder, and lightning.

The fruits of the sal trees, around the courtyard of the Mahua Kothi lodge where we were staying, took wing. Whirring like a fan, they dispersed away with the wind, until the ground was carpeted with the winged sal seeds. The naturalists of the Mahua Kothi lodge joined us in watching this magnificent spectacle with delight and an excitement that grew with every gust of wind. As interpreters of nature, from the humble sal to the royal tiger, for us and for the many other visitors, these splendid naturalists do a daily job, whose value is immeasurable.

With the pre-monsoon thunderstorm has come the wind to carry the sal seed, and the water to nourish the soil where they may grow. And yet, the water is an unwanted burden on the fruit itself, as it makes it short but enormously important spinning journey away from the tree.

Such is the economy of nature that, even as the parched earth soaks the water, the sal shrugs it off its seed.

* * * * *

]]> http://conservation.in/blog/the-heart-of-india/feed/ 4