Anamalais, Western Ghats.
 Bordering the states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, the Anamalais is where both the Eastern and Western Ghats converge forming a gigantic range of mountains featuring twelve different types of forests. The Anamalais are now fragmented by numerous coffee and tea estates that have emerged in the last century. Prone to heavy rainfall, the Anamalais receive an annual rainfall of at least 2000 to 5000mm. Aliayar, Amaravathi, Kaddambarrai, Neerar, Dholayar, Mannambhally and the Parambikulam dams are the large dams and water bodies found in this area. The Anamalai hills are well known for its wildlife sanctuaries and national parks like the Eravikulam National Park, Chinnar Wildlife Sanctuary, Parambikulam Wildlife Sanctuary and the Indira Gandhi Wildlife Sanctuary which host several endemic and endangered wildlife species like the Elephants, Gaur, Water buffaloes, Tigers, Leopards, Sloth bears, Crocodiles, Civets, Dholes, Sambar and the endangered arboreal primates called the Lion-Tailed Macaques. Srilankan Frogmouth, Great pied-hornbills, Nilgiri laughingthrush, Wayanad laughingthrush, Malabar Grey-hornbills, Rufus babblers and others birds inhabit the area making it a birding hotspot.
Topslip, Indira Gandhi Wildlife Sanctuary
 The practice of sliding teak timber logs from the slopes of the hills during the early 19th centuary was the reason for this place to be named Topslip which is adjacent to the neighboring Parambikulam Wildlife Sanctuary. Topslip is close by the Pollachi town which can be reached via Coimbatore. Rahul Rao, an ace Naturalist and founding member of Foliage Outdoors was waiting for me in Pollachi. After a quick lunch, our journey towards Topslip started. Rahul who is an expert bird watcher kept identifying rare and endemic birds on the way up the hills while I was enjoying his commentary while driving.
 Being a holiday season, accommodation was a slight problem. How ever, we did manage to speak to the Ranger and got ourselves a dormitory in the guest house. That evening we walked inside the Karian Shola which is right behind the top-slip guest house. I could hardly see the sky from within the shola and walking inside such a patch of the forest was great fun and excitement. We sighted plenty of Rufus Babblers, and even birds like the Asian Paradise Fly-catcher, Drongos, White-bellied Treepie, Malabar Parakeet, Black-headed Orioles, Nuthatch, Scarlet minivets, Chloropsis, White-throated Kingfisher, Nilgiri Wood Pigeon, Jungle fowls, Shrikes, warblers etc. The next morning, we did a trek in the same place and spent a lot of time watching birds near the water body crossing Karian Shola. A lot of Chest-nut headed Bee Eaters were teasing me to click some photographs but I failed miserably due to their perches on elevated trees.
  The Ranger permitted us to drive to the thick and dense Anaigundi Shola where the patch of the forest was so mesmerizing that thinking of having to get out of here was painful. Plenty of birdlife and view of the Anamalais from an elevated spot was a great pleasure. The distant grass-hills which has restricted or no access was also something very attractive to watch from a distance. After driving on the slopes for an hour, we reached a spot where a Leopard had been released in to the wild recently. The cage was still lying around. We got out of our vehicle and immediately we heard calls of the Lion-tailed macaques at a very short distance. Rahul was telling me, LTMs don’t call frequently. Probably that’s why they are called Macaca Silenus we reckoned. Our tribal guide Ketan asked me to drive a little further and we stopped near a watch tower. Instead of the LTMs this time, we heard the Hornbills call constantly. Rahul and Ketan walked inside the bushes while I was supposed to drive back to the point we stopped earlier. Rahul and Ketan came back after sighting the hornbills fly from a very close distance from their perches.
 For the last part of my trip I was joined by my wife and we were accommodated at the Nature Conservation Foundation’s guest house in Valparai. My main intention of visiting this town in the Anamalais was to sight the Lion-tailed Macaques (LTMs). LTMs are only found in the dense forests of Western Ghats. The shoals here are a great habitat for them to survive. LTMs are mostly arboreal and they travel a lot on the canopy of trees. In the recent past LTM are counted as an Endangered Species and not more than a couple of thousand LTMs live in the wild.
  Being an excellent climber, LTMs roost on very tall trees and often avoid humans. Sighting them is a very difficult thing due to the terrain and their nature of being arboreal. LTMs primarily eat indigenous fruits, leaves, buds, insects and small vertebrates. Valparai is a town which is occupied by tea estates and while Mr. Ananda Kumar of NCF was showing me the statistics of the place I was shocked to see how little of the shola fragments exists as of now. It is no surprised that the Lion-tailed Macaque ranks among the rarest and most threatened primates. Their range has become increasingly isolated and fragmented by the spread of agriculture and tea, coffee, teak and cinchona, construction of water reservoirs for irrigation and power generation, and human settlements to support such activities. They don't live, feed or travel through plantations. Destruction of their habitat and the fact that they avoid human proximity, has led to the drastic decrease of their population, it is learnt.
  Valparai is a hill station with a lot of forest fragments between tea and coffee estates. A few groups of LTMs inhabit this tiny forest patches around the town and sighting them here is much easier compared to the other terrains where they are so elusive. Even in these fragments one has to trek and track them. My wife, our tribal guide Krishanan and I started walking in one such forest fragment and after a few minutes we heard their low calls from the top of tall trees. It was early in the morning and the light inside the shola was very low. We decided to sit in one place and wait for the sun rays to penetrate inside the shoals. Soon, the LTM sighting started increasing and within twenty minutes both the Sun and the LTMs became our friends. At least twenty individuals were keen and eager to check on the visitors to the shola and they all hung around us. Most of them were very ferocious and hyper active.
  Mating, Play fighting, chasing each other, jumping on trees and switching perches like small birds every minute the LTMs entertained us for nearly two hours. One male was so impressed by my wife that he almost went a couple of feet closer to her while Krishnan shooed away the primate. Ananda Kumar, explained to me how the LTMs use “Yawning” as a display of their dominance. He explained to us about their groups hierarchy and their behavior.
He also reminded me that, probably no where else LTMs will be this easier to find and this was not a group that was similar to the general understanding of their behavior. It seemed that the LTMs that live around here had gradually adapted to human interference though they were in complete wilderness. He warned me not to misunderstand the behavior of this particular group as a standard behavior. This seemed to be an exceptional group which displayed tolerance to humans at the same time was on their feet all the time running from one place to another.
 That afternoon, along with Krishnan I went to the same shola again to see if I could photograph them in better light. Surprisingly It took us a whole hour to track them down. This time the primates were roosting on tall trees on one edge of the fragment near a stream. Wonderful light made me watch and photograph them better than what I had done in the morning. They quickly disappeared in to the bushes and tall trees never to return again. Krishnan and I traveled to other fragments near by and tried to watch birds and photograph some of them at least. The terrain was very tough for bird photography which made me realize that I would spend time just appreciate and watching them than doing a lot of circus to get ordinary photos of them in a territory where a lot of foliage and very low light exists.
 I instead got back to the camp and spent rest of the time discussing with Ananda Kumar about his work and the immense issue of Human-Elephant conflict in this area. I got a very thorough understanding of the issue, statistics and some of the measures NCF suggest and are trying to implement. Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF) has setup an interpretation center here and put in a lot of efforts in Rain Forest Restoration. Their tasks include convincing the Tea and Coffee estate companies to spare fragments of Rain Forests within their private property to allow the shoals survive (Even though fragmented)
 NCF has a nursery in which they culture vegetation of such forests and plan them in areas where there is scope of restoration. NCF also works on the Human-Elephant conflict around this area and constantly research and find solutions to problems of both humans and wildlife. What I appreciated most about NCF was their maturity to think that some issues won’t have solutions. It is at least important to understand the reasons for issues so that not much of time is wasted trying to find solutions. In stead efforts can be put to decrease the reasons for such issues. They have a knack of working with companies and they convince them to take active part in solving and understanding issues to our environment as well as us. Their website is [url]www.ncf-india.org [/url]and they are a bunch of geeks in the field of Natural history and Conservation. I wish to spend more time in this place which is required to photograph various other species of wildlife found here. This was a very brief trip and i consider this as a trailor to Anamalais. Atleast a visit once in 2 months to this place can help achieve some kind of a result worth talking about.
A marvelous start to the New Year could have only happened after visiting such a bio-diversity hotspot. May be next time a few more birds as well. Wish you all a peaceful year ahead. Please get to the wild 
_________________
Cheers,
Jayanth Sharma
jay@wildlifetimes.com
Last edited by Jayanth Sharma on Fri Jan 18, 2008 4:19 pm; edited 2 times in total |
