Sahyadrica

It is the coldest day of the year. I’m riding with Omprakash on his motorbike scanning for signs of one of Kanha’s enigmatic species – other than the tiger – the vultures. And there are none to be seen. We are scanning the Kanhari beat as three other teams scan different areas of Kanha known for their vulture populations. A beat is a small unit of a range, but it can be large enough for a team to explore within a few hours; and we have only two of those. It is .7 degrees below zero, and the grass is white as bone. The frost grows on it like fungus, crippling the movement of Kanha’s singing grasslands and turning them into silent tombstones. I am cold and cursing myself for not bringing hand gloves along as my breath turns to clouds. Our beat adjoins Kanha, from which the tiger reserve gets its name. It is one of the first villages to be relocated outside the park. Since then Kanha has seen a dramatic land use change. Agricultural fields gave birth to grasslands, and sal trees...

First Saturday of September is celebrated as International Vulture Awareness Day ( www.vultureday.org ; it was celebrated on September 6, 2014 this year) to raise awareness concerning vultures, and especially their threateningly declining numbers. An article exploring the rapid decline of vultures of India was published in The Hitavada’s Insight supplement, which I am reproducing here with some elaborations. You can read the online version here or here . Insight, The Hitavada Sunday, September 7, 2014 The Plight of India’s Vultures When was the last time you saw a vulture soaring high in the sky? We asked every forest guard and every villager we met as we traversed through the forest villages of Kanha Tiger Reserve, and their answers were all exactly the same: many, many years ago. Only a handful of forest guards see vultures soaring in the skies today, and all of them mostly in the core-zone of Kanha Tiger Reserve, far from any human interventions where they feed on carca...