a leaf warbler's gleanings

A reprint request came in the mail today, for a report and a paper from surveys I had done in Arunachal Pradesh early in my graduate career - two decades ago! Given that I wrote those articles some years before even Mosaic had made it to the Mac Classic in my graduate advisor's lab at UCSD, they remain, thus far, rather beyond the reach of Google's tentacles. I did have an electronic reprint from one paper, which had made the transition to digital form courtesy of the scanners at Interlibrary Loan (at Arizona State University; I think that's where I'd managed to obtain an e-print of that paper), despite having been published in a low-budget journal. The report was going to be harder to find, I told the young Indian grad student who had emailed me, prompting him to ply me with some more questions about the survey (which I may write about here at some point).

So I took the plunge into the deeper, darker, far less frequented neighborhoods etched on the whirling platters of my current laptop's (now a Macbook Pro!) hard drive, hoping to find a copy among folders that had faithfully been copied over from pc to mac to mac through dozens of upgrades (or sidegrades) over the course of two decades, give or take. And there, like tumbleweed blowing across a deserted Western town, what should flit across my screen but the following essay I had written around the same time, but had completely forgotten about!

So now that I'm completely distracted (no sign of that report yet), I figured it might be worth sharing this distraction with some of you. So if you're interested in reading one of my earliest blog posts (you know that's what it would've been if written today) from before there were blogs, read on below the fold. Hey, just for you, I've even spruced it up with... um... what d'you call em?... links! (But I haven't changed anything else, not one comma; except for the double spaces between sentences - ugh!)

WAKING UP TO NATURE

The white landrover picked us up at dawn from our hostel in Vasant Vihar. Dr. Johnsingh sat in the front, leading us six sleepy greenhorns on our orientation tour to Delhi Zoo and Rajaji National Park. It was the second week of WII's new masters program in wildlife biology. As we tumbled out of the Siwalik tunnel, Dr. Johnsingh was telling us about Rajaji and we were trying to stay awake. A little further on, when some white cliffs appeared to our right across a rao, he suddenly asked Navin to stop the vehicle and pointed at a ledge high up: Sambar! I jumped out along with the rest of us and put my binoculars to my glasses. What with my unfamiliarity with that instrument and my spectacles, it took me a while to scan the cliff and train the lenses on the ledge Dr. Johnsingh had pointed out. And there I saw it at last - my first sambar in the wild. Its large ears were glinting in the early morning sun as it browsed calmly at the edge of a precipice. I had read of this creature in some Corbett stories, but had little idea what one looked like: I had hardly ventured far from Bombay in my 22 year lifetime, and the only 'sambar' I was personally acquainted with usually came with idlis in it!

That was how I woke up that winter morning in the Siwaliks from a slumber I had been in not only since the previous night, but many years before that. The past year had been particularly nightmarish as I sleepwalked through one semester of an M.Sc. in Physiology from a Bombay college. Such had been the slumber of my undergraduate years that it had taken me all of 5 years to discover the Bombay Natural History Society which was just round the corner from my college or the cattle egrets that strode elegantly in the rice fields near my home in New Bombay. I joined Bombay University's M.Sc. in sheer desperation as there were no openings in ecology or conservation - which were the first academic fields to have really caught my imagination. But imagination is generally not a very good thing to have in our education system, and by October '87 I was thoroughly disillusioned: I nearly dropped out of college to join the "Save The Western Ghats March", and become a full-time environmental activist! But just then the clouds parted a bit and a letter from WII shone through, inviting me to apply to their new M.Sc. program in wildlife biology! I was barely aware of the existence of Dehradun and had impulsively written to WII the previous year after seeing an advertisement for some crocodile research project, I think. My letter had returned with a now familiar scrawl across it informing me that a masters program was being developed and asking me to write back in a year's time. Signed at the bottom was a rather unusual name: Dr. A.J.T. Johnsingh. Well, so this man Johnsingh had remembered! And here I finally was inhaling the crisp air of the Siwalik, marvelling at the remarkable eyesight of the same Dr. Johnsingh who had spotted that sambar a few hundred metres away from a fast-moving vehicle. The sight of that sambar in the early morning sun was enough to wake me up and shatter the blinkers of my urban middle class existence. This was truly a new orientation for me!

It was late afternoon about a year later and our class had been following a herd of Barasingha across Kanha meadow through the day. We had already spent a week in Kanha NP, and had seen all the large mammals including 6 tigers. It was a big day for us: it was exactly a year since the M.Sc. course commenced, and for the first time we were entirely on our own, not accompanied by any faculty member and with a jeep to ourselves! We were making group-scan observations on this herd as part of our behavioural ecology field class. The day had started with the rutting calls of the barasingha and had been uneventful as we followed our focal herd, apparently controlled by one adult male, across the meadow into a drowsy afternoon. As the sun approached the horizon we were stretching ourselves and preparing to get back in an hour or so, when things began to happen. The dominant stag had managed to isolate an adult female as the rest of the herd moved away, and started courting her assiduously: for half an hour he circled her, sniffing at her rump and mounted her repeatedly, but she always managed to slip out from under him. Finally she gave in, and they gradually drifted back towards their herd. As they passed through a copse of sal trees, we skirted around it to catch up. As we turned the corner, our path was blocked by two magnificent stags, bigger than the male we'd followed, sniffing the air and looking towards the mated pair. Before we realized what was happening they charged straight for the male and a full fledged fight broke out. The clash of antlers echoed across the silence of the meadow and the dust flew high as our male tried hard to ward off the two intruders and protect his reproductive interests. But as he was engaging one of the intruding stags, the second charged after the female and mated successfully! The herd moved on then as the intruders retreated. The golden dust was settling back softly on the grass and a herd of gaur was crossing the far end of the meadow, wonderfully back-lit by the setting sun, as we returned to camp for the night. What a spectacular first anniversary for the M.Sc. program!

The M.Sc. years were perhaps the best of my life, filled with the joy of discovering the natural world after an urban childhood. That joy and innocent enthusiasm has been draining out of me through the past nearly three and a half years as I struggle to come to terms with the harsher realities of nature conservation in India: a process that started during the latter half of the M.Sc.—during that Kanha trip actually—and has only become more painful with each passing day. Parts of Kanha were burnt down the year after we saw that barasingha fight; the white cliffs of Rajaji may soon become out of bounds as the plague of terrorism spreads through the terai and siwalik forests; the beautiful valleys of Dachigam in Kashmir where I did my masters thesis may never be the same again and we may have seen the last of the hangul there; the lowland forests of Arunachal Pradesh—that rainforest dreamland of my M.Sc.—might not even last the duration of my Ph.D.! How unfortunately lucky I have been: privileged to discover some of the most beautiful things on earth and watch them go up in flames!

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Update/notes: The above was written (for the WII newsletter) during the early years of my Ph.D., yet it resonates with my current soul. My despair has deepened, yet it is also now oddly tinged with some hope as I seek silver linings to the dark clouds over the environment (even as my own head has quite a silver halo now) through reconciliation ecology. Kanha recovered from the fires and the barasingha continue to bellow in their rut across the meadows there, although the tiger population in India has suffered a massive hit. The hangul are still around, and may even have benefited from two decades of armed conflict in Kashmir because people were too busy pointing their guns at each other to shoot the local wildlife! As for the lowland rainforests of Arunachal, they've been hammered, but hope lies in the work of a new generation of biologists carrying the torch in India now, like my young correspondent who is studying hornbills in those very forests; and has written me this week to compare notes as he retraces some of my fumbling steps all those years ago...