At the Feet of Living Things: Twenty-Five Years of Wildlife Research and Conservation in India

Have you wondered what it is like to follow hornbills in a dense rainforest? Or felt the pain of a mountain shepherd losing his sheep to a leopard? Or how it feels when a child discovers birdwatching is more exciting than being glued to a screen? The world of nature conservation is full of adventure, but it is also hard, fraught with challenges and setbacks, made worthwhile by the privilege of studying at the feet of living things.

In this book, the scientists and researchers of the Nature Conservation Foundation describe how they grappled with conservation in India. Since 1996, they have wandered mountains, coral reefs, and forests to describe, document, protect and restore species and ecosystems. They have studied the lives of primates, snow leopards, hornbills, elephants, dugongs, fish, trees and other creatures. With local communities, they have experienced the sometimes-harsh reality of living with the wild side of nature. And they have strived to bring children and citizens to celebrate and learn about it.

Each reflective and deeply personal narrative in this book goes behind the science to describe the challenges of conservation. At the Feet of Living Things will appeal to students, researchers, conservation practitioners, wildlife managers, nature enthusiasts and interested citizens.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins India
• Release date: Sep 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9789394407930

Book preview

Introduction

What Every Starfish Knows

Aparajita Datta, Rohan Arthur and T.R. Shankar Raman

THERE ARE TWO WAYS TO be a student of nature. You can collect, preserve, dissect and describe it, accurate in every sinew and cell. Or you can breathe along with it, engage with its messiness and feel what it feels to be a thing in the world. From both these modes emerge vital truths about nature; of what it is made, what shape it takes and what makes it work. The lessons of the first are precise, replicable and unassailable. Of the second, we are not entirely sure. Its teachings are fuzzy, impalpable, even unreliable. With the first, you can chisel with algebraic purity the results of your enquiry and walk away with the certainty that when you return, an eon from now, those equations will still hold. Not so for the second. Sure, you can still write down all you have seen, thought and felt, but you can never really walk away. The student and the subject are entangled by the very act of observation. This is the wager of being a field ecologist.

The first rule of life is living. Author John Steinbeck, who explored the Sea of Cortez with his marine biologist friend Ed Ricketts, knew this well. Once you commit to being a student of the second kind, once you have sat at the feet of living things, you get to sense ‘what every starfish knows in the core of its soul’. Like the starfish, Steinbeck says, a true student of nature must proliferate in every direction to the limits of your potential, to leave no direction unexplored. 

Steinbeck and Ricketts wandered like starfish along the shores of Baja California more than eighty years ago. The world of nature they inhabited has changed. The space for unbridled nature has shrunk to accommodate the human being’s insatiable dreams of growth and progress.

We have seen a similar shrinking in India, too, made even more stark in recent decades. With species and habitats in retreat, we are witnessing a dramatic unravelling of the grand interaction that holds the world together.

Linked as we are to the entanglement, we are part of this unravelling, and it is impossible to merely sit by and watch as the strands come apart. Yet the idea that nature can be somehow bounded within exclusive protected areas, leaving the rest for humans, is a delusion. It misconstrues our place in nature, and nature’s relation with the world. This vision of nature ends up limiting how and where nature can exist.

India: a challenge for conservation

If the division between nature and non-nature makes little sense generally, in a country like India it is a mirage that fades as soon as it forms. People and wildlife live cheek-by-jowl, sharing spaces and resources, shaping each other’s environment, plagued by the same forces of change, each striving to eke out its existence in a crowded country. It is not always a friendly neighbourhood and our relationship with wild species can sometimes be prickly, angry or devastating. However, there is a degree of tolerance and acceptance unthinkable in most other parts of the world. India escapes easy generalizations. The diversity of its habitats, landscapes and wildlife is matched only by the diversity of its people – in language, cultural mores, social and economic conditions. This often uneasy and variable ‘coexistence’ has ensured that much of our wildlife, including many threatened species, continue to live outside the designated protected area network. India’s track record in environmental governance has been patchy and is now increasingly dismal. New and wider roads, coal mining, large dams and many other industrial and infrastructure projects are fragmenting and destroying wild spaces. At the same time, climate change is causing an unravelling of basic ecological processes, accelerating the loss of species and habitat decline, and threatening human communities who depend on these ecosystems for livelihoods.

India’s pluralistic democratic structure leads to an often cacophonous, tumultuous conversation of diverse voices debating the ways conservation should be done. There are voices that speak for a more just and inclusive conservation paradigm that moves away from models that exclude people and, instead, allows for community access, rights and forest governance. Others bat vigorously for an approach that gives primacy to law enforcement, policing and setting aside of inviolate protected areas (PAs). People who listen to or understand both sides of the debate are few.

These ideological stances are often deeply held biases and views, while in practice evidence shows that the efficacy of these various models depends on local factors and site-specific contexts. PAs do work and are needed, but they also need stronger and inclusive systems of governance. Issues of past and current injustices to local communities due to the creation and existence of PAs need to be addressed.

In India, much wildlife is found outside PAs, including large mammals and threatened species, and this needs to be better understood, recognized and supported. Additionally, we need to acknowledge that community governance systems also work, but, just like PAs, they may not always succeed and function properly and effectively. They may not always bring immediate benefits and positives outcomes for wildlife, and, similarly, only state-managed reserves need not always achieve conservation goals of saving wildlife. Conservation is always a work in progress. Conservation is messy. It requires long-term commitment. It requires inclusivity and cooperation.

Apart from conservation outcomes, there is the question of justice and equity, and the impact and consequences that an exclusionary model of conservation can have on rural communities that disproportionately bear the brunt of decisions made in the interest of conservation. While India has strong conservation laws, their implementation is often poor, with often unjust consequences for rural communities living in and around PAs. In the north-east, for example, national laws applicable to the whole country are not in tune with the social customs or cultural practices of that region. This results in dissonance and discord between cultural practice and the law. 

The broader environmental movement has had its roots among rural communities, tied to their need and rights over natural resources and the struggle for access, ownership and governance. The more elite, urban-based conservation movement is helmed by scientists, naturalists and others who are driven by different motivations to save species and wild habitats. Within the latter group, there is a gradient of differing views and positions on conservation approaches and the role of the state and the communities. While there is some synergy between the two groups (rural- and urban-based), they remain very different approaches with little interaction or dialogue. The increasing threat to India’s wild spaces due to many infrastructure projects and industries and an environmental regulatory process that is fast losing its teeth does not augur well for the country’s environmental governance. However, there has been a heartening increase in citizen engagement, public outcry and participation, and campaigns for these environmental issues, much of it expanding through social media as well as through traditional forms of citizen protests.

Thinking like a starfish

Doing conservation in a crowded country requires us to take Steinbeck’s words to heart. To proliferate in every direction, to the limits of our reach, one must set aside assumptions of what it would take to make a positive difference. There is no guarantee that, freed from these assumptions, we will solve the complex problems of wild nature in a country like India. But there remains a slim chance that, unblinkered by ideology or precedence, we will stumble upon something new and untried. And if we stick with it, it may just make a difference.

At the Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF), we have attempted to make a difference through the pursuit of socially responsible, science-based conservation in India. Our conservation work has focussed on people–park conflicts; people’s rights, and access and use of resources in PAs; restoration and recovery of degraded ecosystems; species-focused protection and conservation; human–wildlife interactions, including conflict mitigation and participatory community-based conservation programmes and working with the government to influence policy and environmental decision-making; and bringing people and nature together through public engagement and participation in nature and site-based education programmes. We have also engaged with governments through various national- and state-level decision-making bodies and committees regarding industrial and infrastructure projects, species conservation and management of wildlife reserves.

Working across land and seascapes, we first try to understand and document a problem, based on which we explore conservation interventions and ideas to address the problem. However, this latter part – the ‘practice’ of conservation – is fraught with unforeseen challenges, often related to engaging with people, be it the local community or the government, dealing with internal and external threats, local politics and the socio-economic context, and many other factors that are dynamic. In some of our work, we have engaged at a higher level with policymakers to translate our findings into action or foster good practice.

Many of the conservation stories we read today document ground-breaking, disruptive solutions that are seemingly implemented with clear-sighted strategy and unwavering surety. These stories chart a familiar arc – a pressing conservation problem, a set of clearly identified points of intervention, a process of engagement with local enablers, followed by a series of unalloyed successes with benefits for both wild nature and human communities.

We have grappled with several of the knotty problems alluded to above. Yet, if we are honest, very rarely have our paths been as smooth, as triumphant or as insightful as the conservation narratives we often read. Our journeys are more like those of a starfish exploring a rocky shore. We have stumbled and made mistakes. Some of the obstacles we have encountered have proven too big for us. Some of our successes have been smaller than we imagined them to be. And some have had consequences that we did not intend or desire. Through this scattered voyaging, we have had insights and learnings that have made us less certain and more circumspect and humbled than when we began. The only thing we can truly say for certain is that the journey has changed us. As students of nature, firmly of the second kind, we do not know where the subject ends and we begin. This book attempts to tell, with as much honesty as we could muster up, some of the lessons we have learnt at the feet of living things.

Telling our stories

For the last twenty-five years, NCF scientists and conservationists have worked on diverse species and ecosystems across India. Through our experiences, this book tries to bring forth several contemporary scientific, social and conservation challenges across wild India, and the need for long-term engagement through research, conservation action and connecting with people. We believed that writing a reflective book about some of our conservation efforts would be a useful way of bringing together over two decades of experience to the conservation and environmental literature in India. Space and other limitations have necessarily circumscribed this volume and we have not managed to encompass all our experiences, including innovative research and conservation efforts by several colleagues, students, field staff and partners from local communities. Many of them, young and old, have their own wonderful stories to tell and we will look for future opportunities to tell them.

India’s geographical, biological and cultural diversity is wondrous and we are privileged to have had the opportunity to have taken some part in experiencing and understanding this natural world – from exploring cold desert steppes that are the haunt of the snow leopard and the blue sheep in the high Himalaya to researching coral reefs and myriad fish in the Indian Ocean; to studying and conserving rare hornbills and magnificent trees in the dense tropical forests in the north-eastern region, and to mapping, protecting and conserving wildlife and restoring rainforests in the Western Ghats. From learning to live with species such as leopards and elephants; studying the behaviour of primates, elephants, dugongs and fish to understand the lives of other beings; and to bring together thousands of amateur naturalists, birdwatchers and children to learn about and celebrate nature and document their observations as citizen scientists.

The book distils some of our learnings and experiences for a larger audience – the challenges, the ups and downs, the pain and the heartbreak, the momentary joy and elation. As both academics and practitioners, we felt the need to write about the process, the undocumented daily challenges of conservation, the ways in which we work with people, how we resolve differences or, sometimes, don’t, and the problems that crop up frequently. This book would go back and delve into our past and ongoing work, and discuss what went wrong and what went right. 

We wanted to highlight the gap between conservation practice – the real-world nitty-gritties of dealing with on-ground conservation problems versus the ‘science’ of conservation. Through the stories in this book, we try and explore what it takes to bridge the gap between the science and the practice of conservation. We hope this book will appeal to everyone interested in conserving nature, including academics and practitioners, and help people understand the beauty of life on Earth and the practice of conservation better.

The stories in this book

This book begins with a theme at the forefront of many conservation issues – the conflict over nature, land or resources. It is a conflict of contested spaces and ideas of how a landscape should be governed, often framed as People and Parks. As the two chapters in this section highlight, it is also a conflict of different world-views: a dominant paradigm that believes pristine nature can flourish only if devoid of people, another that rejects notions of the pristine and considers people part of nature and agents of conservation. Authors Rucha Karkarey and Mayuresh Gangal write of the challenges of trying to draw lines in the water to conserve the extraordinary marine life in the Lakshadweep archipelago of the Indian Ocean. And diagonally across India, from another far borderland, Aparajita Datta recounts the challenges of conservation in Namdapha National Park in Arunachal Pradesh, a landscape of astonishing diversity of plant and animal life, where a remote tribal community contests its displacement from a park created to protect tigers.

Another major impetus for our work has been a focus on key wild species: first understanding them, and then helping to conserve them. The chapters in Among Wild Species describe the experiences of Charudutt Mishra on snow leopards, Elrika D’Souza on dugongs, and Aparajita Datta on hornbills. They portray the personal and intellectual journeys of the researchers and their sustained efforts, working with their teams and local communities, to conserve these endangered species, while embedded in each unique landscape. Anindya 'Rana' Sinha paints a delightful narrative of a day in the life of a bonnet macaque with his troop members, the intricacies of their social life, behaviour and minds, and how they can be subtly undermined by changes wrought by humans in their domain.

Both within and outside protected reserves in India, people live alongside many wildlife species, from sea turtles to elephants. Their daily interactions raise many challenges for coexistence, which is the focus of the chapters in the next section, Living with Wildlife. Ananda Kumar and his colleagues Ganesh Raghunathan, Vinod Krishnan and Sreedhar Vijaykrishnan chronicle their journey to transform human–elephant conflicts to coexistence in the states of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. In the contrasting cold desert landscape of the Trans-Himalaya, Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi and Ajay Bijoor chronicle their journey of navigating the relationships between people and snow leopards. In the next chapter, Rohan Arthur and Teresa Alcoverro detail the fascinating story and unintended consequences of successful sea turtle conservation, which resulted in increasing conflict with fishers due to depletion of seagrass meadows and fish stocks. From the Trans-Himalaya, Yashveer Bhatnagar speaks of his research journey studying mountain ungulates such as the ibex and the evolution of Project Snow Leopard as an inclusive approach to conservation where agro-pastoral communities live with the big cats.

The section on The Fall and Revival of Nature speaks of the growing impetus to not just protect nature but to ecologically restore previously degraded habitats and understand the resilience and recovery of plants and animals in a human-impacted world. Shankar Raman and Divya Mudappa bring hope for a revival of nature through their two-decades-long, painstaking ecological restoration of fragmented tropical rainforest habitats, focusing on quality, careful nurturing and long-term effort. From the coral reefs comes a different perspective, where Rohan Arthur tells the story of the ups and downs of two decades of scientific monitoring of coral reef health, its resilience in some years, and then the dying, the loss and the rekindling of hope.

Much of NCF’s work has sought to reach out to and engage a wider constituency of people in conservation, addressed in the final section, Bringing People and Nature Together. Suhel Quader writes of the joys and motivations of birders and how a collective citizen science effort of thousands of birders has been harnessed through eBird, a global online platform that everyone can use to document birds and understand the state of India’s birds. Pranav Trivedi tells the story of a nature education programme for children that started in the Trans-Himalaya in 2005 and has grown over sixteen years to encompass children in different Himalayan states and landscapes to rekindle bonds with nature. Swati Sidhu and Geetha Ramaswami record their journey of starting a programme to get people involved in watching, learning and documenting trees as markers of seasonal and environmental changes, engaging with schoolteachers, educators, students and citizens across the country, and coming to grips with what they could do and the limits of what could be achieved. The last chapter in this theme is more to do with the personal journey of the researchers as observers, as people enamoured of the joy of understanding and knowing nature. The book ends on a light-hearted note with P. Jeganathan taking us along on a somewhat mad obsession of watching birds and listing them on eBird.

Overall, the work evocatively described in this book, while narrated by a few, was made possible by the contributions of many. It needed sustained teamwork. The world of conservation, in India and elsewhere, often places undue importance on celebrating individuals as superheroes or heroes of conservation, a culture that lionizes a few celebrities. It creates a simplistic narrative devoid of nuance. This is a disservice to a collective effort by so many who do a lot, often quietly. It takes resilience, strength and perseverance to carry on with challenging conservation work and it is the collective effort and teamwork that needs to be celebrated.

I

People and Parks

1

Drawing Lines in the Water

Rucha Karkarey and Mayuresh Gangal

‘IT’S LIKE SEEING A THOUSAND leopards swimming in the sea,’ Ummini, our local friend and collaborator, exclaimed in disbelief as we shed our diving kits on the boat. We had just surveyed a coral reef in Bitra, a speck of a sand spit nestled within a sprawling lagoon in the northernmost reaches of the Lakshadweep archipelago. It had taken the six of us eight hours the previous day to reach this remote island from Kadmat, our field base and Ummini’s home island. We had spent a sleepless night huddled together on a small fishing boat while the open sea churned and drenched us, and now we were exhausted. It was imperative that we reached Bitra before the new moon, come rain or shine, to witness a spectacular natural phenomenon. ‘I’ve been diving in these islands for fifteen years and have never seen so many kokkachammam (local jasri term for the squaretail grouper) in one place before,’ Ummini remarked as we made our way to the Bitra jetty. 

Lines underwater

We had been diving at this site in Bitra since we stumbled across it in January 2011. We had returned a year later, in January 2012, to monitor the coral and fish as part of our annual archipelago-wide survey. Bitra’s reefs were intriguing – a mosaic of coral patches surrounded by sand banks, quite unlike the reefs we had surveyed in other atolls. Those were more uniform. The site gleamed in the distance while we skimmed across the lagoon channel. As we approached the reef, a massive white sandbank stretched out under us with a behemoth of a coral perched on its edge like the Buland Darwaza of Fatehpur Sikri – a gateway to a secret kingdom. This site would not require a GPS (global positioning system) marking, we had joked.

Peering down from the boat on that new moon day, things seemed a bit unusual. The water was murkier than in the last two days, quite rare in these parts where the view is crystal clear down to a depth of fifteen metres. Underwater, Ummini unrolled a fifty-metre tape along the reef contour – a ‘transect line’, which would provide a reference point for us to census fish in the reef. A few minutes later, Rohan, lead scientist of our research team, and I, Rucha, an aspiring PhD scholar, followed suit. We counted 176 fish on our first transect, twice as many as the previous day. Large squaretail groupers (Plectropomus areolatus) hovered along the slope (the edge of the reef that gently descended into the deep) like street hawkers at a village fair, restlessly peering into the distance as if waiting for something or someone to arrive. Our colleague Vardhan, having abandoned his coral photo-clicking, was merrily engrossed in filming a large squaretail jostling another out of its territory. The grouper flashed a myriad of colours before it eventually locked jaws with the intruder: white when chased, marbled brown when displaying his might and black when resting. As Ummini prepared to roll out the transect line a second time, he froze. He watched transfixed as a large shoal of 150 squaretails slowly sashayed on to the reef. Their arrival spurred a renewed frenzy of ardour among the larger males, who left their territories to entice several large-bellied females away from the shoal. Some females left the shoal to settle down with the courting males while the others maintained their sisterhood to withstand the marauding bucks. Meanwhile, planktivorous fish feasted on the milky plume, presumably fish spawn (ejected egg and sperm) wafting in the water column over the reef.

Squaretail groupers are large, piscivorous reef fish that can grow up to a metre long and are found across the tropical Indo-Pacific Ocean. Tawny coloured, with blue and black spots, they stealthily ambush their prey – in an uncanny resemblance to a leopard. Also like the big cat, squaretail groupers lead a more or less solitary life except for when they spawn, that is, when they gather in large numbers to reproduce. These phenomenal events are called fish-spawning aggregations (FSAs). Healthy aggregations can have hundreds to thousands of individuals that gather from nearby reefs. FSAs generally occur around the new or full moon, after which the groupers disperse to their ‘home’ reefs. Many FSAs show a high fidelity to certain locations, mostly around lagoon channels and large promontories where water currents can be strong. The large sandbank at the mouth of the lagoon channel in Bitra was a textbook example of such a distinct location. After chancing upon a large number of squaretails at this site in 2011, we had returned to monitor this site for a week around the new moon in January 2012, in order to ascertain if this was indeed an FSA. We estimated 849 groupers at the aggregation site in an area the size of a football field. The ingress of gravid females, territorial bucks and their curious courting rituals confirmed the spawning aggregation, a first in Indian waters. We were elated with this discovery! Did anyone in Lakshadweep even know about this? 

Ummini, a veteran local diver, certainly did not. An earlier report, based on interviews with local fishermen in Lakshadweep, had not found any evidence either.¹ Could not knowing be a good thing? Apart from being wondrous spectacles of animal behaviour, FSAs are predictable and highly conspicuous, drawing fishermen from far and wide with the promise of bumper seasonal catches. Since fish that generally form spawning aggregations (such as groupers and snappers) are commercially valuable, fishermen target spawning aggregations for a guaranteed and lucrative catch. Aggregation fisheries are highly unsustainable; by stemming a crucial stage in the natural replenishment of fish populations, local stocks are often plundered to near extinction within years.

Ummini set out on a covert mission in Bitra to investigate this. He struck up conversations with islanders in the evenings, casually enquiring about seasonality in the catch of gravid fish and their locations, but in vain. The fishermen spoke at great length about pelagic tuna, their preferred protein, but were unassertive about nearshore reef fish that were neither fished commercially nor for subsistence. We left, planning to return the following year to further monitor the aggregation.

Lines in the water

Thunderous applause resounded in the small classroom at the Bitra primary school, where eighty residents and fishermen sat together for a discussion in February 2013. Ummini paused a moment in his speech. ‘Not only is this the biggest aggregation of squaretails in all of Lakshadweep, it is amongst the largest in the world. What happens to the aggregation near this small island of a square kilometre and 300 people is of significance not only to your community, but also to Lakshadweep and the world,’ he reiterated emphatically. The islanders beamed with pride. ‘What can be done?’ Issaq, a fisherman, eagerly enquired.

As planned, we had returned to Bitra in January 2013, a year after confirming the aggregation. Mayuresh, who was working to become a fisheries scientist, was thrilled at the prospect of witnessing an FSA for the first time. He had not been certified as a SCUBA diver yet, but we had promised to take him snorkelling at the site. We approached Bitra at the crack of dawn and immediately noticed five tuna fishing boats anchored in the lagoon. Bitra was an important atoll where itinerant tuna fishermen from across Lakshadweep camped out for months, fishing for tuna in the northern sunken sandbanks of Cheriyapani and Veliyapani. After breakfast, we headed over to the aggregation site. Underwater, a familiar scene unfolded – male groupers jostled and females shoaled in the water column ahead of the new moon. As was custom, we counted groupers along the permanent transect lines we had marked the previous year. Then, towards the end of the dive, something caught our eye. We saw a male squaretail furiously rubbing against a coral, his movements erratic, his colour pale. We noticed a large hook wedged into his mouth, with a metre-long trail of fishing line. As we watched him, the keels of two boats suddenly skimmed the surface above us. Their engines reverberated through the reef, making the groupers momentarily cease their pomp and pageantry and disperse haphazardly under cover.

We came up from the dive to see Mayuresh on one of the tuna boats, furiously taking notes and looking at his watch. ‘That boat caught thirty groupers in half an hour,’ Mayuresh said when he returned, looking very concerned. He showed us his calculations. ‘If three boats fish at this site for three hours each, they’d be able to catch up to 400 groupers. That’s half the number you counted underwater today!’ He continued, ‘They caught mostly females and a few large males.’ We watched as the tuna boats left for another place on the reef, wondering why they were fishing so close to it.

‘I don’t think they know about the aggregation. I think they’re just fishing on the reef because tuna catches are poor,’ Ummini said. A handful of agents from the mainland were now providing small sums for reef fish from Lakshadweep. The tuna fishermen would occasionally supplement their paltry tuna catches with reef fish. ‘If we speak to them, they’ll definitely stop. People in Lakshadweep want to protect their reefs,’ Ummini assured us. He told us how Minicoy managed its baitfish by conserving lagoon reef patches in rotation. We could cut off this indiscriminate reef fishing at the roots if we acted right away, we reasoned among ourselves, ever the young, idealistic scientists.

That night we paid a visit to Mr PPA, the island’s panchayat leader (leader of the local governing council). We showed him footage of the spawning aggregation and explained the curious biology of groupers and the fishing impact we had witnessed. He was wonderstruck. ‘If we are destroying our own natural wealth, then we have to take responsibility and do something about it,’ he told us and decided to organize a discussion with the islanders the following month. We took great courage from that conversation.

‘Some places manage this [FSAs] by permanently closing the aggregation sites to fishing,’ Ummini spoke at the meeting in Malayalam. There was unease among the fishermen. ‘But instead of a permanent closure [Marine Protected Area] we could temporarily close the reef for a week around the new moon – two days before and after it between December and April. Our data show that the groupers use this location to spawn for that small duration. They don’t seem to be using the lagoon so we can fish there. In this way, we could share space with these groupers without restricting our activities or disturbing them when they spawn,’ Ummini suggested. The fishermen deliberated the options for an hour and finally approved a week-long ban on fishing when the groupers aggregated to spawn. We left the island with a letter signed by the head of the Bitra panchayat and eighty islanders, requesting the Lakshadweep Fisheries Department to make a legislative order about the temporal fishing closure in