Field Reports

It was a close friend, Varun Vaze, a management student by training and a keen wildlife enthusiast from Pune, who initiated our hunt when he called to ask me, “How do you search for a trapdoor spider?” He was in the Satara district at the time, hoping to explore the Kaas valley region for spiders.

A major evolutionary trend that separated early primates from other early mammals was arboreal living. While most mammals chose to move to grassland, marine and other ecosystems, primates made trees their niche.

Little, unforeseen experiences often change people’s lives and perspectives. In the 1990s, when I was still in school in Bangalore, we had a quaint garden surrounded by several vacant plots in a densely wooded area near our home in Mathikere.

Several attempts are being made to popularise frogs in our cities. To this end, the ‘Bangalore’s Frogs at Risk!’ poster by Seshadri K.S., Krishna M.B. and Sunil Kumar M., 2012 is being distributed free of charge in Bangalore.

I followed Lobinso Malo on a narrow forest trail, literally running to reach our destination in time for the village puja. A young man in his twenties from the Mishmi tribe, Lobinso was my interpreter and guide.

August 2012: Atypical day would begin with a sip of tea and crunchy ‘vada’ in one of the roadside chaai kadais (tea shops), breathing fresh air and watching the sun rise on one side and mists wrapping the mighty Agasthyamalai hills on the other.

June 2012: January 11, 2012 – “We can leave at twelve o’clock,” announces Tesoro, a senior field assistant at the remote Leatherback Camp on Little Andaman Island.

April 2012: The call came in on December 16, 2011, at 2:45 p.m. A group of Santhal tribals from the Hooghly district of West Bengal were about to embark on a wild cat hunt. I had long heard of these hunts and was curious to know why they hunted and what their modus operandi was.

April 2012: Photojournalist Shailendra Yashwant writes about threats to Dzongu, the legendary land of the Lepchas,in the Himalayan state of Sikkim in India.

February 2012: On November 25, 2011, two Rapid Response Units (RRUs) were delivered to the Kanha Tiger Reserve. The off-road vehicle was supported by three motorbikes and equipment that now enables field staff to handle poaching gangs, deal with man-animal conflicts, safely tranquillise and transport carnivores and dispense emergency first aid.