Sahyadrica

“Remember what the dormouse said…” Waking up to the loud call of the chicken ( Gallus domesticus ) is so common for us that even clocks come with prerecorded calls as alarm. The call belongs to the male fowl, the cock – it is the quintessential bird and the omnipresent sound of the Indian countryside. It is only when you have lived long enough in the countryside that you realise this call is not typical of mornings. It is driven more by the presence of the hens around, and if there is a brood around, a cock might sing all night. Today, the koo-kuduk-koo of the chicken is recognized more by a watch’s alarm and the chicken itself for what it is – food – than for its historic association with humans. This history is quite interesting, an important chapter in the book of mankind, no less: How the hunter-gatherers observed wild fowl life history to not only hunt – they are still hunted – but to capture them live and breed and tame them and keep them around settlements which are found t...

Elephants and Chhattisgarh: An Ongoing History The elephant population assessment report of India is due for over a year, and it is likely only next year that we will see the numbers. Much has happened since the last update in 2017: About 1,160 elephant died in the 2010 decade mostly due to human-related causes (500 in the last five years alone since the last report) [ 1 , 2 ] – that’s 4% of the 2017 population of elephants, at 27,306 for the country. On the other side of this equation, 4,000 people died in the last decade (1,500 people in the last three years alone) due to human-elephant conflict [ 3 , 4 ], and an estimated 10,000 sq km of crop fields are damaged by wild elephants every year [ 5 ]. Overall, over 100 elephants and 400-500 people die every year, making human-elephant interaction an important issue to address. The delay in the assessment report, therefore, is a matter of concern. Much of wild elephant boundaries have been redefined –   in Central India, from seven ...

  A Commentary on the Decade Past and Decades to Come for Tiger Conservation in India This longform article puts numbers of tigers and allocated budgets of the decade past to protect tigers into perspective with simple math. It proposes a shift in attitude from looking merely at numbers to pockets where numbers can increase and at making this undertaking more participatory in the coming decade. This article focuses solely on Project Tiger’s All India Tiger Estimation and Tiger Reserve allocated budgets, and not the socio-ecological ramifications of this 48 year old project, but discusses the latter as being of paramount importance than merely doubling tigers in the coming decade. This is a part of a larger piece tracing history of wildlife conservation in the context of central India. The opinions in this article are mine; data sourced are cited. Counting tigers In 2018, about 12% of India’s geographic area was scoured for tiger signs – from the periodically inundating mangrove...