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.

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.

The roads from Mysore, leading west into Kodagu, and south towards the Biligirirangan Hills, are old roads. We know they are old, not from the road itself, or the people, certainly not from the speeding vehicles. We know it from the great trees growing by the side of the road for mile upon mile. These are grand Ficus trees, the fig trees we know as banyans, metres in girth and sprawling in canopy, planted and nurtured to life by some blessed soul centuries past. Today, they add the only uplifting aesthetics and rejuvenating shade to the otherwise bare and dour tar road. And yet, all along the roads, these huge, ancient, centuries-old banyan trees are now being hacked.

Winding through a picturesque countryside, taking little dips and turns and the contours of the Deccan plateau, towards the Western Ghats and other hill ranges, these roads seemed to sit gently on the landscape. There has always been ample space for vehicles, even large ones, between the trees on either side. And even as the vehicles plied back and forth, the trees were full of life. Indian Grey Hornbills and barbets and mynas come to feast on the luscious red fruits of the banyans, as do monkeys and squirrels. Myriad creatures feed, roost, mate, sing, rest, hunt, play, and sleep in the trees.

Yet, it is not just the animals that benefit. These are trees planted by people, primarily for people. From the scorching sun of the Indian summer, these trees offer dense, cool shade, the only respite from the heat in the open landscape. Many are the travelers—yes, there are many who even now travel on foot, bicycle, cart, and without air-conditioning—who rest in the shade and move on refreshed. And who cannot envy, or at least appreciate, in the heat of noon, the good fortune of this man, here, who has discovered the joy of a nap under the shade of a ficus tree.

Even as the man sleeps, a little distance away, village boys are busy, lopping a few branches of the banyan as fodder for their livestock.

Scaling the branches like little monkeys, they diligently lop a few choice branches, stack and tie their bundle for taking to their farm for their livestock.

When the trees are many, the lopping seems a minor matter, and the trees have perhaps borne the children and provided for livestock for centuries. But now, the trees are few, and as you read, they are becoming fewer. A massacre of the great trees has been underway along these roads for some time, and continues even now.

Here is a grand banyan being dismembered along the Mysore – Madikeri road.

This great tree is now gone. In the background, one can see a few sorry Australian Acacia auriculiformis and Eucalyptus trees—obnoxious alien species that can never muster even a fraction of the ecological importance or aesthetic grandeur of the banyan.

This is the scene from a few days ago on the Chamarajnagar – Asanur road, near Mysore.

Dwarfed by the massive stumps of the destroyed giants, the vehicles and people pass—apparently untouched and unrepentant.

And all along the roads the logs pile up but will not stay here for long—even when dead, the trees are too valuable and the lorry to take away the logs—the spoils of slaughter—is just round the corner.

We stop to talk to the people cutting the tree. They tell us that the order is passed by the Highways and Forest Departments to cut the trees. The order is passed—what a passive statement of active slaughter! They say the road will be made wider—another order has been passed, perhaps. They also think the trees are over 500 years old. They continue their work—swing their axes and pull at their saws, taking turns to rest, and to hack. Two men hold a rope tied to the top of the tree and pull taut, away from the sawyers at the base of the tree; it should not fall on them, or harm them, even in its fall. They saw away with zest.

It is just a day’s wage labour to obliterate the growth of centuries.

The extraordinary value of the fig trees is something the entire world of ecologists, particularly those from tropical countries, has come to appreciate. Fig fruits are a favourite food of many animals. Research has so far identified over 1200 species of animals to eat fruits of different Ficus species around the world.

A brown palm civet gorges on wild figs in a rainforest (Photo courtesy: Kalyan Varma)

Studies have also highlighted how, by fruiting copiously, producing tens of thousands of fruit on a single tree, often during seasons when other foods are scarce, figs are a critically important resource, labeled keystone resource or keystone species by ecologists. The remarkable relationship between the tiny fig wasps and the fig tree is the stuff of ecological legend and fascinating natural history. Anyone who has spent an hour under a fruiting banyan can attest to the life that such a tree brings to a landscape.

Why, then, do we need to cut these trees? Yes, we need roads, good roads; that is something most of us would not dispute. But what really is meant by a good road? Something that is more wide, more open, more homogeneous, and more barren in appearance, and, coincidentally of course, also requiring bigger contracts to be laid? Or something that is well surfaced, well marked with road signs, well integrated into the landscapes that it passes through? Studies have shown that roads with aesthetically pleasing vegetation, with grand trees on either side, even have positive, restorative effects on driver behaviour, reducing frustration on the road and perhaps making it a more enjoyable journey.

What manner of person, what kind of State, would perpetrate this horror, this butchery of the banyans, and that too apparently without hesitation, or a moment’s doubt? Needless to say, it is being done in the name of the Indian citizen and we ask: where are you, citizen, who wishes these great trees cut?

Is it too much to ask that trees such as this, which are markers of our country’s great natural and cultural history and heritage, be saved rather than sawed?

We waited on the road, watching the traffic go by. Behind the building, we saw him move. He was a young tusker, with asymmetric tusks—his left tusk slightly curved forward while the right pointed straight down. With dignity and grace, and with all senses alert, he walked down towards the road.

The road was not a very busy one by the standards of any city, but for the little hill town of Valparai, here in the Anamalai hills of south India, it was arterial. The tusker was in a little plantation of Eucalyptus above the road. Below the road were the Iyerpadi tea estates, the Iyerpadi factory, houses of estate managers and workers, a swamp-stream, and beyond that a patch of rainforest close to the Anamalai Tiger Reserve.

Besides us, some of the estate people were watching the elephant. On the road, vehicles plied back and forth and some people went walking past, hardly fifty metres from the elephant. The elephant could see, or sense, all of us; with his trunk up, he monitored our scent and presence. Nervous, he let out a short blast of a trumpet. Yet, it did not seem that he trumpeted from anger; it seemed a brief  warning to get us off his path, and let him through.

While others watched, I moved closer to try and get a better look and a photograph. A little skid-trial came down the slope to the road and below the road a path led through the tea estate. The elephant seemed to be moving down that way. I stood right there, at that intersection, and sure enough he emerged, hardly thirty metres away.

He looked grand in the evening light. I was awed and clicked away to try and get a photograph that would fittingly record his grandeur.

And yet—I stood right in his path. He stopped, alert, and looked at me directly.

Divya and others who were watching from some distance urged me to move from there. And yet, I stood as if transfixed. Perhaps it was that wholly unnecessary photograph that kept me. Or, a falsely superior rationalisation:  “This is not the way he should go. There are houses and people down there. Maybe if I block this path, he would go around taking, what I think, is a better route.”

He gave me a few moments to reconsider my stupid, irrational decision. As I did not move, he did. Gently, he turned away, to swing down, taking a more inconvenient, steeper, rocky slope.

A group of women, coming to collect firewood, were casually walking towards the elephant, thinking it was one of the domestic elephants being used in tree-felling operations. We convinced them that it was a wild elephant and urged them not to go in that direction. On the steeper slope, the tusker turned back and swung down—towards the same route he would have more easily taken if I had not foolishly stood in his way. He kept moving, now forced to cross the highway a little further ahead of where he had intended.

We tried to halt the traffic on both sides for a few minutes to let him cross. It was scarcely necessary, he knew how to deal with traffic and crossed the road without a hitch and without disturbing anyone in vehicles or on foot.

He was heading in the general direction of the houses and the factory and anyone watching him, who did not understand the elephant in him, would perhaps have thought this spells trouble.

The tusker wanted no trouble, however, and just wanted to be on his way. And it was wonderful to watch how gracefully he moved, carefully avoiding the proximity of the houses. He needed to go that way, because beyond these houses and factory in Iyerpadi, was a rainforest fragment and the Tiger Reserve, and, perhaps, respite from others like us.

He quickened his step. He walked down. He swung away from the houses. He avoided a car that was coming up on an estate road (although he was close enough to it that the people in it may have got a scare). He turned down the valley, past the temple, into the swamp, and reached a path that would take him, without crossing any further road or colony, towards the forest patch.

A bunch of kids appeared from the vicinity of houses, all excited and trying to follow the elephant as he walked away. We dissuaded them—with a little persuasion, they stood to watch him from a safe distance. We had come to the colony to inform the people to watch out for this tusker on the move, but, again, it was scarcely necessary. The people had seen him and, moreover, the tusker had no interest in the houses. He really knew where he was going.

I will remember him as a gentleman of Iyerpadi and I will remember my foolishness of that evening. This is my apology to this gracious and peaceful elephant. I am sorry I stood in your path. I am sorry for thinking I knew better than you.

* * * * *
25 April 2009, Iyerpadi

The more we speak to people here, Manish and I, wandering from house to house with notebooks, Dictaphones and cameras, the more blurred the boundaries become between the Newtonian world I choose to live in, and the pragmatic metaphysical universe of symbol and myth that Chowra constructs for itself.  At one level the community is held together with some of the most far-sighted institutions – all rules, justice, equity and fair play, maintained by strong bonds of reciprocity and kinship.  At another, the island mindscape is sculpted deep with superstition and living myth.  Giant octopi. Vengeful, ship-wrecking fish.  Ghosts of drowned fishers that swim the reef.  Shamans and the power they can wield over a naïve soul.  And a host of complex ritual and belief that governs the calendar of the Chowra islander.  Christianity takes little away from this, adding yet another layer to this rich tapestry of symbol.

So, this evening, after Lenten Vespers (Abide With Me sung in Car Nicobarese), the islanders walked around the village bare-chested, with banana leaf garlands around their necks, their bodies smeared with pig blood.  Christ on the cross. The Lamb of God. Spirit into flesh. A slaughtered pig.  The 39 lashes. Flesh into spirit. Rites of spring.  All these curiously intertwined images made vividly real on the chiselled red glistening bodies walking around the village.

And just when you are ready to succumb completely to the tribal haze, the island generator comes on, and the bloody bodies all become transfixed to the television in the Tribal Council Chief’s house, watching a lurid Tamil film dubbed into Hindi.  Here too the homogenisation of cultures is proceeding apace.  As we walk back to our sad alien capsule on the border of the grasslands, every household we pass has a small gathering of families paying homage at the altar of their post-tsunami television sets.

And yet…

And yet…

A culture that still smears pig blood on their bodies as a part of their catechesis must surely be more resilient against the relentlessness of something as mere as the cathode ray tube.

Right?

Early last year, I chanced upon a news article with an accompanying video on the Reuters website. The piece going with the provocative title When elephants go berserk spoke of African elephants in Kenya. It spoke of elephants that “escape from a  national park”, “destroy crops” and so on. The piece provoked me to write a response to Reuters through their website, for which I received nothing in return except an electronic reply saying something to the effect of how busy everyone at Reuters was.  I have a bunch of thoughts on elephants, such conflict issues, and their portrayal in the media, all of which will have to wait for a later post. Right now, I thought I would put up this link and my response to Reuters to see what others think of this. Comments are welcome!

Take a look at the link here, first. And here’s what I wrote them:

This refers to a video on your website with the caption “When elephants go berserk” (http://www.reuters.com/news/video/videoStory?videoId=76199)

As a practicing wildlife scientist in India, where Asian elephants similarly enter crop fields or areas with people during their movements, I felt that the caption used in the news item was unnecessarily sensationalist and rather insensitive. The video really only shows elephants scared out of their wits and running in absolute trauma, with at least one individual narrowly escaping being trampled by another of its own herd.

When reporting theft or murder by humans, news agencies routinely use words like ‘allegedly’ or ‘apparently’; in fact, such cautious wording may be necessary to prevent libel suits. Why is no such caution used when describing what large and indeed, intelligent, animals do? Is it because the elephants can’t sue news agencies if they are labelled raiders, rogues or (wanton) killers, or if they are said to go “berserk”, cause “terror” etc.?

Our field research over many years, here in India, has indicated clearly that a large majority of cases of conflict between humans and elephants is due to accidental or incidental reasons, often as innocuous as a herd walking along its migratory route (trying hard to avoid people) which is now taken up by cultivation or development. Most cases called by the media as “rogue killing” or “manslaughter” should really be called “accidental deaths of people encountering elephants” usually in the dark or when in an inebriated state. What is called “raiding” is often better labeled “damage” or “incidental damage” and so on. In some cases, there is absolutely no damage caused and the media still plays up the issue.

I could go on… but I just wished to plead to whoever is reading this (and I hope someone in a senior-enough editorial position is) will take a more sensitive and accurate stance in using the right words to describe these issues. Asian and Africal elephants are endangered species—what the media write about them can help them enormously or hurt them further. Do you really want to be another agency that is beating an animal that is already down?

I would be happy to share our learnings/discuss this matter further because if an international news agency of such repute and importance as Reuters can be persuaded to review this aspect, then there is much hope.

Sincerely.—

***

While the media, as a group, vacillate between balanced and berserk, elephants, as a species, walk a tightrope for their survival.

A tusker treads the thin line between forest and cultivation.

Four and a half years after the tsunami, and it still dominates the land and daily discourse of Chowra.  Dead coral rubble and broken tree branches – rainforest and reef – intertwine together like a crown of thorns around the white sand circumference of the island.  The villages we walk through are dignified shanties, corrugated tin, slashed together with what scraps the islanders could salvage from their old homesteads. A shattered jetty.  Broken roads.  And the ubiquity of government contractors that descend on every disaster with their own particular government-sponsored recipe for decadence.  In the case of Chowra, they plan to relocate and reconstruct entire villages well away from the coast, making this an island that turns its back to the sea.  They are eating away at the central grasslands to build their planned concrete slum, replacing the romantic village roundhouses of grass thatch and wood with square characterless cement matchboxes.  Each family will be given a single nuclear house, thus breaking apart the complex joint clan structure that holds the community together.

Sitting in David’s house – makeshift roof and walls, half-a-century-old floorings – I wonder how long it takes for a community to completely recover from a catastrophe as large as the tsunami.  Somehow I am not convinced, as I eat the lovingly cooked meal that is offered us, that the government policy of providing free rice and lentils for five years running contributes any to this resilience.  Goodness of intent is often the mask behind which deadness of imagination hides.

Yet, through the washed-up, beaten-about flotsam village that Chowra appears to have become, it is clear that resilience is something less mensurable than tin roofs, broken roads and numbers dead.  Stripped of more than I can imagine would be bearable as a community, the island of Chowra responds with a self-possessed certitude in the strength of their community institutions in holding them together as a people.

The Chief Captain, Jonathan, is a man of very few words, but it is clear that everyone on the island reveres him.  He  politely welcomes us to his island, but equally politely conveys his suspicions to us and decides that for the time being, we are to be treated as ‘other’, and have to live in the government ‘guest house’ along with the other ‘others’.  It is a small, firm gesture, but it gives us a clear sense of where we belong in relation to this island.  David, worldly-wise, young, trilingual, is put in charge of us while we are here.

Last evening we spoke to the Tribal Council Chief about the Hokgnok system that provides the principle governance structure of the island.  The Hokgnok revolves around clan groups and plantations, and dictates the patterns of resource sharing within the community.  The small crowd that gathered around us spent over an hour describing for us the Panwahnot, the big Pig Festival that happens every year in November.  It appears to drive the Chowra calendar, and each Hokgnok gets its turn to take charge of the preparations, with help from the other Hokgnoks.  Preparations begin in March, with the preparation of orchards, and the repairing of houses and plantation fences.  When the time arrives, pigs, bananas, chickens, cloth and a variety of other festive items are gathered in large quantities for the start of the festival.  Fifteen days of dancing follow, and it all culminates in a big canoe race.

As they spoke, their eyes lit up with pride at the magnificence of their feasting but also at the strength of the community that allows them to pull it off.  There was something else in their voices as well which I could not completely understand until just before we left.  They spoke about the Pig Festival in a vibrant living tense. I asked them casually about the number of pigs they had killed in last years’ ceremony.  And that is when it came out.  The last time they had celebrated the Panwahnot was a month before the tsunami, and never since.  Yet they were holding on to their present continuous as firmly as they could, as though the maintenance of tense itself was sufficient to keep alive the tradition.

Perhaps there is truth here.  Perhaps this is one of those impalpable metrics of resilience that keeps communities together.  The people of Chowra have enough evident pride to leave me with the conviction that they will weather their changes with dignity and wisdom.  They will celebrate the Panwahnot again, they say. I want it to be true. My only regret is that I may not be here when the pigs are slaughtered next.

This November, they assure me.