Hot water at your own risk!

As a kid I remember being told by my near and dear ones to be very careful with electricity, having got little jolts of the same at times of not being cautious I sure do know what it feels to get electrocuted. And I suppose all of us would have got such advices and are very cautious when there are wires with open ends around.

First few days I spent in singampatti near KMTR, got me all sorts of breathing complications due to a very dirty room and the cold water bath added to my misery. When the Sorimuthian kootam (will write about it later) was over and Dr ganesh took me to Kodayar where my work would actually happen, I was quite happy to see the placid surroundings, mist or rather cloud covered mid elevation evergreen forests, calls of great black woodpecker resonating in the tall forests and the gaurs glistening in the early morning sunrise on the hills due west. All this made the place all the more beautiful!

Chetan, my colleague was showing me around the quarters where we stay and in the bathroom, I set my eyes upon two nails projecting on the wall, curious as I was, asked him what it was and got a shock when he told me not to touch it even in my dreams as it is fed live through the transformer and the nails are used to fit the heater to heat water. With that, I still had not understood what the “heater” was the impression I had was a typical water heater element which is to be dipped into the bucket of water. I forgot about it till a month later when I moved in to stay and start my work in the field.

Soon I realized what the Heater Chetan had talked to me about was- there was a heating element true, wound on a normal 4X10 cm cardboard with two leads connecting two single core insulated wires hooked at the free ends. Still confused as to how it works, I asked Vivek, another colleague of mine to demonstrate the operation of it, and looking at the sparks flying when it was hooked on to the nails I was surprised, shocked and taken aback at the same time!

It took me quite some time to get used to the fact that such dangerous equipment is used to heat water. A cold water bath atleast wouldn’t kill people!

Having stayed there and gotten used to the weather there, I realized that the cold water bath can actually kill as the temperature goes down to about 8 degrees in winter and decided that death in the hands of the heater was a better bet and began using the same, it became a regular thing to any one of us who are there to explain the functioning and repairing of the heater to any new comer.

Once a lady called mythri came to volunteer for my work in the canopy and after a long tiring journey in the bus, we reached Kodayar by late evening and being a gentleman, I asked her to freshen up first and then I would do the same, she obliged and left to the bathroom, suddenly I realized that I had not followed the protocol of telling her about the nails and rushed in asking her to wait and all of a sudden there was a mild squeak and a long silence of a few seconds which seemed like donkeys ages.

The worst possible things ran through my mind as I jumped across the living room to the bathroom to see what was wrong.

There I saw mythri standing and staring at the nails, speechless. On seeing me she pointed to the nails and on it was the room key, which she had delicately hung on the nail to keep it safe. It was in fact so safe, no one could get it out! Relived that she was safe, I got a wooden stick, used to hoist our celphones when talking and removed the key thanking the stars for saving her life.

And after that a long advice and a little bit of exaggeration of how close to death she was followed and I think it did serve the purpose of making her aware of the dangers of such silly mistakes that she stopped using the nails to heat water and either muthu my assistant or myself had to do it for her.

What I still don’t understand is why would anyone with any little common sense, hang a metal key to a nail visibly wound around by a wire!

A full cycle

Those with very little grounding in biology will know and appreciate the complex interrelationship between organisms known as the food chain. It is this chain of relationships which links organisms; it enables energy flow and nutrient cycle to go through the system before ending as nutrients in its abode- soil, longer the chain, more the benefactors. One such chain I witnessed was that of a carcass of a Brown palm civet, possibly killed by a Leopard and hidden in dried leaf litter on a trail in Kodayar.
After a quick lunch, myself and Muthu my assistant were in search of more trees to climb and while on the move, I came across a patch of leaves looking a bit offset from the surroundings, instinct told me all was not well in that place and on clearing the leaves, I saw a half eaten carcass of a civet. The sight, just after lunch was not very pleasing I would say, but the knowledge of the interactions we gained through the sighting far exceeded the gory sight. The civet though only about ten percent in mass compared to the leopard seemed to be a good source of nutrition to many creatures from insects to the leopard itself and must be one of the reasons why the cat had taken the trouble of hiding it. As soon as the leaves were removed a swarm of a few hundred flies took off from it only to settle back in a moments time, on closer look, about 70% of the civet was eaten and all that was left was the head, the front left leg, hide of the back and the long tail. Civets, when alive are nocturnal and mostly arboreal, feeding on fruits and insects but when dead, insects quickly take up the opportunity to devour them as if to seek revenge on their kin’s death.
The kill seemed to have been made in the wee hours of the day had attracted many flies, which had quite effectively laid eggs on the mortal remains there by ensuring that the maggots don’t go hungry. Having felt that the cycle starting with a fruiting tree, going through the civet, and ending up with the soil as the insects feeding on them eventually die was complete, I quickly took some pictures of the carcass, the head, the foot, the tail and also took some hair from the body as it can be used as a reference when and if a diet analysis of carnivore scats is undertaken to know what others feed on civets, and tried to cover it up as it was hoping the leopard would come and finish what was left. After a week, while on the trail, I did not find any hint of the civet or that of the cat.

Cicadas- key to madness

Many researchers and wildlife enthusiasts often get into the forest thereby avoiding the madness which has now become synonymous of the cities they live in and one does not easily believe if someone says that that working in the forests especially in the canopy is one sort of madness due to one little creature- “Cicadas”

Cicadas, harmless little insects, which feed on the sap of trees, are nice and gentle as long as they are in the soil, waiting for up to fourteen long years or so to metamorphose into flying adults. Once they have done so, their presence will never go un-noticed, for they develop with the ability of flight the ability to sing!

Their songs, so loud and ear piercing are highly capable of temporarily deafening ones ear and the continuous cyclic calls can push a person if exposed for sufficient time to a state of temporary state of madness and as a matter of fact new inventions borrowing natures concept have been made to stop criminals from escaping by exposing them to a beam of high frequency noise which effectively makes the person immobile.

These insects after their sudden emergence from the forest floor can be found on all vertical gradients from the floor, and their activity in the canopies seems to be the highest. They take off calling loud with a little disturbance and continue long after they reach to safety, they shoot drops of watery solution, which in fact is the excess sap of trees after the nutrients are absorbed, they sing in synchrony thereby enabling the females to choose the best contender to mate with and louder the call, better the survival of the male seems to be the rule of thumb but never do they trouble people in any other way.

The high frequency song is most of the time highly rhythmic and well co ordinate like that of an orchestra and is generated due to intense vibrations of the membranes in their exoskeleton and amplified many times to generate the loud song. After the act of mating, one by one all the cicadas die and the forest goes silent as it was, before the emergence of these singers and all that remains of them is a few molts on tree trunks, a few un eaten dead bodies and a new breed of cicadas waiting in the soil to emerge and begin the noisy maddening orchestra all over again!

Fused out

Electricity has become one of the most essential commodities for humans, ever since it was invented.To satisfy the needs of the growing economy of the country, development is a must and with it, there has been exponential increase in power consumption. To cater to this need, large tracts of forest have been cleared up to setup Hydel power projects, which bring in a whole spectrum of problems with it. New roads are made, people from great distance settle there, the forests are submerged, cleared and felled to build the dam leading to habitat fragmentation with which, the local biodiversity is lost or altered to a significant extent.
These power projects have problems persisting years after they are commissioned. Electrocution is one such example. Though humans are safe from it, thanks to the danger signs, wildlife unfortunately, is not. The high voltage power lines passing through forests cause habitat fragmentation and hinder the movement of animals; the animals are also prone to electrocution when they come in contact with the line while moving through the forest. Arboreal wildlife like the endemic Nilgiri Langurs and the Lion tailed macaques are in high risk and they have been seen hanging dead on the power lines at frequent intervals. Recently, two Nilgiri langurs, endemic primates got electrocuted and were discovered by some researchers; both of them, in prime health condition were adult females and were instantly killed due to the high voltage. Such mortalities on the long run can affect the population if breeding females or infants get caught in the maze of power which cris-cross forests all over the country and measures like the use of alternate sources of energy and judicious usage of power resources is the only viable option to prevent an energy crisis to destroy our already depleting forests.

a snake that died of hunger!

“Snake! Take a stick, Whack! Whack! Whack!! Ah, now we are safe…” seems to be a common notion in the minds of people, be it a village or a metropolitan city.
Our watchman at the field station at Singampatti was needless to say, no different from these people, and had killed a Wolf snake, a non-venomous snake which lives and feeds amongst leaf litter in the wee hours of morning. He had come out in the night to answer nature calls and got so scared by seeing the snake that he took a stick (always kept close for security and contingency usages like this) and hit the snake some 3-4 times till it stopped moving and had left the corpse out there, scared even to move it from there. On explaining him his mistake and advising him not to kill snakes, he felt remorse and agreed not to do it again, just to make us feel happy.
The snake, a sub adult, measuring 63cm was still cold and flexible. The snake was so badly hit that the jaws were almost sealed together and the spinal cord was flattened at 3 different places! Dr Ganesh suggested that i do a diet analysis of the snake. The diet content of snakes are very significant in terms of the feeding habits and would be of great help to wildlife rehabilitators as they would know what the snake eats feed it properly.
The only way to do it is to see the stomach contents. Back at the field station, a miniature lab was set up in the nursery, and with Murugan, the ever enthusiastic driver, I started to cut open the snake and must confess that this was the first ever creature I was cutting open and my hands were shivering! some more inputs form Giby, I managed to pull out the stomach and the intestine and cut it open too and to my surprise, it had three long worms, alive and wriggling. I promptly thought it to be freshly eaten food, removed them and preserved them in alcohol and later was told by Abhisheka that they were internal parasites! And the stomach was empty.
This poor snake came out in search of food had actually died of hunger!

Improvising with camera traps

One of the recent advancements in the field of wildlife monitoring is the improvement and increased usage of “camera traps”. A camera trap is basically a camera with a remote trigger connected to infrared sensors, mot ion detectors and heat detectors replacing the conventional shutter release button. This contraption when set up on trails, ponds and other places where there is evidence of wildlife movement, will take a picture of the animal passing in front of the camera. Camera traps have been used extensively to monitor wildlife populations since the time of its coming into existence. Lately, it is being used to estimate the number of tigers in a given area besides capturing rare behavior and the existence of other lesser seen fauna, monitoring the populations of critically endangered species like the Snow leopard in the Himalayas and so on. These easily available camera trap units have also been used in many other conventional and not so conventional situations like near the nest of an owl by TNA Perumal, who got scratched by the owl in the process, but was rewarded by fantastic flight images of owls and many interesting feeding habits which was never seen or documented before. Some of us at ATREE have been successful in using these camera traps to capture the first ever tiger picture from KMTR , obtaining rare images of the Pigmy Hog and the leopard cat from Manas tiger reserve, to capturing the lives of arboreal mammals in forest canopies. Quite recently, we implemented the camera trap in more unique situations. This was during the annual Sorimuthian festival, to document the movement of wildlife during the festival season and in another case during the pre harvest paddy season, in the plains of Singampatti, to capture the occurrence of rodent feeding owls. Though both were by and large failures, they taught us great lessons which will enable better deployment next time. In the former case, the camera traps were discovered by the forest patrol staff and enthusiastic children, who then proceeded to pose in front of the camera triggering the entire film roll. All we got were a few laughing faces of homosapiens. The latter case was a trial run and un-loaded cameras were deployed to see if it would work. In order to make the owl trigger itself, we setup rodent feeding trays in a paddy field getting ready for harvest. The camera traps were fitted on to improvised posts made of discarded plastic water pipes and entrenched in the field. A perch was created for the owl in the field, overlooking the entire field. Though nothing much happened in this experiment, for the owls or the rats turned up, we were all delighted and relieved to find the camera traps in the place just as we had left it! We also learnt that the traps and the rodent feeding trays had to be left in the field for a few days for the rodents to acclimatize to it. Of course, the big lesson of all was that there weren’t any rodents in that field for the owls to come and feed. The only way to get owls to come would have been to release a couple of rodents into the field!