The Mahindra Bolero vrooms past a throng of colourful signages for spice and tea shops and people in bright saris, lungis and slippers in downtown Valparai, a small town in north-western Tamil Nadu. On the tin roofs of some houses and shops, a family of lion-tailed macaques, endemic to the region, frolic, stepping through open doors like nosy neighbours, peeping into windows, scouting for a quick snack.
Wildlife biologist and ecologist Divya Mudappa deftly weaves the vehicle through the crowd and rues how the macaque – a keystone species in the tropical rainforests of the southern Western Ghats, which is also on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species – have adapted to the increasing human imprint in the tea estate town.
As we head down State Highway 78, the cacophony of the market falls away to be replaced by the soft coos of macaques interspersed with the lazy schoolboy tunes of Malabar whistling thrushes and a deafening chorus of cicadas. The road now skirts Puthuthottam, a tiny habitation of tea estate workers adjacent to a rainforest.
Divya stops the jeep on the side of the road and gets out to meet some residents.
Last night, a macaque was killed at this spot by a rushing car. All night, its body lay mangled, blood rivulets snaking on the tarred road, before being removed. Blood was still crusting the paving. Accidents like this are quite common on this highway. In recent years, increasing tourism, fast-plying vehicles, better road infrastructure have led to such heart-breaking roadkills of not only macaques but other animals like leopard cats, barking deer, Malabar giant squirrels and sometimes even leopards. To counter this, the Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF), a non-profit wildlife research and conservation organization in India, which has had a field research station in Valparai since 2001, has deployed field staff on the road – like Dharmaraj and Kannan – who huddle with Divya right now. They follow a group of 150 endangered macaques that live in the area, warning speeding vehicles with signboards in their hands, especially when these groups are foraging alongside or crossing highways. They request people not to feed wild animals or throw food waste on the roads.
NCF has also put in mitigation solutions like canopy crossings – ropes made of old fire hose and rubberized tarpaulin – so the animals don’t have to cross the roads on the ground. This has had mixed success. Some mammals, like the Malabar giant squirrel I was taking a video of, use them often, but some completely ignore them, preferring the forest floor and the deadly highway that divides it. Every time a roadkill happens, Divya, who co-heads NCF’s Western Ghats programme with her partner in work and life, T.R. Shankar Raman, makes sure it is logged by her team and the local forest authorities. This data, collected daily, and built up over years, has helped her team convince authorities to make speed breakers and add signages along this part of the highway. However, an increasing rush of tourists to this once sleepy town who love to ‘feed the monkeys’ or mindlessly throw trash are causing more roadkill.
A few minutes later, the scientist deftly manoeuvres the Bolero off the highway on to a mud track along a swamp. The land we are driving on belongs to Parry Agro Industries Limited, a company that NCF has a partnership with. As the jeep bounces its way down the bumpy road, a Malabar grey hornbill glides by us. I request a stop to peer at this beauty through my binoculars. At the edge of the swamp to our right, Divya points to the marks of digging left by a sloth bear and to a swathe of pink impatiens, a group of wild balsam plants endemic to these hills. The cloistered swamp gives way to a regimented landscape of uniformly planted tea bushes sparsely shaded by silver oak and then to a hectare of a young rainforest along a riverine slope called Lower Paralai. We cross the stream, stop, step out of the car and walk back to the bridge.
Fifteen years ago, Lower Paralai used to be designated as ‘jungle’ by tea planters – a patch of land not viable for commercial plantation. NCF tied up with Parry Agro and began to restore this patch by planting native rainforest species. Though not very big, the forest here is of critical importance as it helps the ecology of a patch further downstream where there are a lot of natural native trees, providing a crucial corridor for birds, bees, and other wildlife transiting downslope.
Divya sits across a stone guardrail, looking very much part of the landscape in her navy shirt, trekking pants and binoculars. She gazes lovingly at the young forest, reminiscing about how difficult it was to grow these trees as the place was rocky, and the soil was degraded and choked by weeds. She points to a four-hectare plot upstream that they call the Lower Paralai island plot, where their restoration efforts have not made much headway as the soil is very clayey and gets waterlogged during the monsoon. All of a sudden, we are distracted by a mixed flock of birds – Malabar starlings cross us, while a streak-throated woodpecker calls out from an oak tree behind, and a greater coucal hops on to a tea bush, startling a grey wagtail. Divya exclaims at the wagtail, a winter visitor from beyond the Himalayas, and in the same breath tells me to keep a lookout as elephants were spotted in the hills in the morning, and they might be heading our way along the river or by the mud track.
Busy testing my recorder, I look up. ‘Elephants?’ I ask. ‘Yes,’ she nods. ‘We’re sitting right in their path.’
Encountering wildlife is a way of life for locals in Valparai, and not just the cute, smaller mammals like the furry-haired macaques or Malabar giant squirrels. A tea plantation worker heading back home in the evening might encounter a leopard, an elephant or a herd of gaur. This is thanks to the unique location of the 220 square kilometre Valparai plateau. Two hundred years ago, this plateau used to be a contiguous tropical rainforest, but the British cleared the area in the late nineteenth century for tea, coffee and cardamon plantations. Now, it is home to the plantations of India’s prominent tea companies, nestled between tropical deciduous and wet evergreen forests, bordered by the Anamalai Tiger Reserve to the north and east in Tamil Nadu and the Malayathur and Vazhachal reserve forests to the south and west in Kerala.
Divya and Shankar started NCF’s field research station at Valparai to conduct and support research on wildlife, mitigate human–wildlife conflict and restore degraded rainforests so the area’s wildlife could easily cross through the plantations. The plan was to partner with the tea companies that own the land and restore fragments of degraded rainforest on their plantations that they weren’t using commercially. The couple had been working in Valparai even before the research station was set up, ever since 1996. Giving a project decades of your time is essential to creating any real impact, feels Divya – it is a timeline long enough to experience love and loss in a landscape and truly belong to it. ‘I have lost my pets to leopards who came by the field station in the night for a snack,’ she points out, adding that it’s only once you live in the ecosystem, understand its cultural and historical context, that you can conserve it effectively.
This excerpt from Women in the Wild by Shweta Taneja, edited by Anita Mani, has been published with permission from Juggernaut.