A week at Bhadra

I had the privilege of being part of the Tiger Estimation activity (It is not called Tiger Census anymore) at Bhadra Wildlife Sanctuary from 21st to 25th of Jan (Had to skip 26th and 27th for work related reasons).

Bhadra is around 500 sq kms of moist deciduous forest. I was assigned to the Lakkavalli range which is about 70kms by road from Muthodi where all the volunteers, around 40 of us, had reported.

The first day was about the what, why and the how of the activity. The actual estimation was spread across six days. The first three days involved tiger and other carnivore sampling and the next three involved sampling of the ungulates.

The big cats (tigers, leopards etc) being soft bellied animals prefer to move in areas with less undergrowth. Hence walkways are ideal locations to search for them.

Unlike the past, this time there was no attempt at actually counting the number of tigers. Instead, we just look for signs of the big cat. The signs include visual sighting, pug marks, scat, kills, rake marks (where the tiger has scratched a tree – a typical cat behavior) and any audible signs like growls etc.

All this data is collated across multiple sanctuaries and fed back to WII (Wildlife Institute of India) where numbers are crunched and some fancy statistical formulas are used and finally an estimate is arrived at. The whole process is supposed to take a couple of years.

Also, unlike previous times, tiger numbers are estimated on a landscape basis as opposed to individual sanctuaries/national parks. So Nagarahole, Bandipur, Madhumalai and Wynad form one landscape, Bhadra and Kudremukh form the next, Sharavathi, Dandeli, Anshi and Goa form the third. This way the meta populations are estimated which is more accurate than saying 30 tigers in Nagarahole, 50 in Bandipur etc.

This time, in addition to looking out for signs, there is an attempt at DNA fingerprinting the tiger population. For this, we had to look out for scat and collect any fresh scat that we came across.

So the first three days, I and two personal from the forest department, walked on jeep tracks on a five kilometer stretch looking for signs. The first day, we did find a bunch of pug marks and some scat, mostly old, so we did not collect any.

The next two days were better in the scat department. There was one instance where we came across almost fresh scat which seemed to be a few hours old. I cannot remember when I was as happy looking at shit. We collected a whole bunch of tiger crap stored safely in polythene bags and more importantly away from our lunch boxes.

On day four, we went out on ungulate tracking. This involved a four kilometer trek (two going in and two coming back) on a line transect into dense forest. Along with looking out for Chital, Sambars, Barking deer and other herbivores, we also took some measurements of vegetation diversity (for this, every 400 meters, we mark out a 20m circle and then write down the top 5 species of trees and shrubs.). Then, we look out for, well, deer crap on a 20m straight line. Depending on the number of pellets that we find (yes, we had to crawl on the ground looking for pellets and counting them), we rate ‘A’, ‘B’ or ‘C’ (over 250 being C).

The basic idea behind ungulate tracking is to estimate the carrying capacity of the forest. An adult tiger requires around 50-60 deer sized animals per year. This means that there needs to be at least 500-600 deer to sustain one tiger (remember, not every hunt will be successful). So by estimating the prey density, one can judge the health of the ecosystem for tiger sustainability and how many can it hold.

Enough of the estimate part, more interesting are the stories told by the forest personal who accompanied me.

Tales of elephant attacks and how some people were killed is not really comforting when you are walking through dense forest. But the story I liked most was the one on how this forest was saved from human onslaught.

Apparently, the forest range that I was in was a completely different sight around 10 yrs ago. There used to be rampant wood felling and poaching. The guard said that you could walk kilometers into the forest and not see one deer. There would be around 50 to 100 cartloads of wood being chopped everyday. The forest guards were abused and threatened by the timber mafia and most of them had simply given up on protecting the forest.

And then one day an incident happened which turned the tables. On that night, a forest watcher and a few other guards stumbled on a few people chopping wood and pursued them to a village close by. The watcher then fired a bullet in the air but that caused the villagers to come out believing that someone was shot. In the melee that ensued, the miscreants got more of their people to the location and a fight broke out. The forest guards were beaten up mercilessly and barely managed to get out alive.

The forest department decided that enough was enough. With the help of the local police department, over the next few months they tracked down every one of the accused and made sure that they realized what pain was. Following that, they began clamping down on all activities inside the forest. Cases were slapped for the most minor of offenses and people were locked up. This was when the department wrested control back from the mafia and there has been no looking back since. Now, people are afraid to even pee in the forest. And over the last ten years, the forests in this range have recovered remarkably. Goes to show that, nature can fix itself if we just let it be.

Well, that is my experience over the past five days. The only downside for me is all the tick bites that now adorn my body. These blasted creatures the size of pin head can be such a pain. There are red spots all over and they itch like crazy.

So over the next couple of months, if you call and I don’t pick up the phone, it’s probably because I am too busy scratching myself...