The elephants stood at the stream's edge. As the adults drank in measured trunkfuls, calves gambolled in the water. Just above them, on the slope, a large sambar stag emerged silently from the undergrowth. From a cluster of trees above came the scolding call of a giant squirrel, as a troop of Nilgiri langur foraged in the canopy.
Just as we were slipping into a reverie, imagining ourselves in pristine wilderness, a woman called loudly to her children playing nearby as she washed clothes outside a neat row of houses, a mere hundred metres upslope of the elephants.
This vignette, from the Anamalai Hills of southern India, is not all that unusual. Across large parts of our country, a wide range of species still occur outside the confines of wildlife reserves, and even in the middle of busy, human-dominated landscapes. This is possible because a variety of natural and human-modified habitats - forest fragments, coffee plantations, orchards, paddy fields, marshes and lakes – still exist outside our reserves. These habitats may offer permanent residence for smaller creatures, whereas larger species may use them as passageways to move between wildlife reserves.
But the size, location and status of these habitats that lie outside reserves often belie their importance to the survival of endangered animals. This is so for many reasons.
Firstly, our wildlife reserves, crafted more by circumstance than by design, look like islands when seen on a map. But not long ago, wild animals occupied vast unbroken stretches of habitat – the Western Ghats that run across five states is a good example – and have evolved to move and migrate across such large landscapes.
Read the full article :
Wildlife beyond boundaries: The clue lies in corridors - The Economic Times
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