Forest trails- the story tellers of the jungle

It is easy for the inexperienced eye to easily conclude “Oh these forests have no animals” when they don’t seen any animal. Contrary to their notion, the exact opposite seems to be happening to a person who knows to read the tell tale signs animals leave behind and unfold the story that would have been enacted by the denizens of the jungle. Picturesque descriptions of such stories in forests have been excellently narrated by Jim Corbett and Kenneth Andreson in the numerous classics they have written. Most of the stories they encountered seems to still be the same for any keen observer who steps into the forests especially on to the jeep tracks or beat roads as it’s called.

Recently, as a part of accessing the impact of Sorimuthian pilgrimage on the forests; a team undertook extensive occupancy surveys along the roads near the main road where there is vehicle movement. Teams of 2-3 individuals walked on these roads and documented any signs of animal movement in its various forms from Hoof or Pugmarks, excreta, scent mark, scrape marks etc on the ground. Each such encounter invariably had some small little story to tell and was indeed one of the factors which kept the enthusiasm going in doing such thankless and seemingly monotonous work.

On one such survey along the famous “Puckel’s path” our team comprising of Abisheka, Dr Ganesh , Samuel and Seshadri began a survey at around 1530hrs, rather late in the evening. We soon encountered a lot of evidence of Chital and sambar and were having this gut feeling of sighting some or the other animal like the Sloth bear, which had been previously sighted by Rajkamal on the same trail. At some distance away from the main road, we came across fresh, beautifully preserved pugmarks of a sloth bear who had very casually ambled along the road which was laden with fine clayey soil brought in by the recent rains making it perfect for imprinting the human like paw in it. The marks seemed so fresh that for a moment, we all looked around to possibly catch a glimpse of the bear which might just be around the corner! The bear had walked on the road for more than 100m and all of a sudden, we saw pugmarks almost one fourth the size of the adult and realized that the bear was accompanied by its cub. The cub, as per the discontinuity in pugmarks, had come almost all the distance piggy back and had got down and walked with its mom for a short  distance before they had turned into the forest and disappeared in the mix of grass and thorn scrub. Such are among the countless other stories that lay wait to be stumbled upon by passing naturalists with keen eyes to decipher the treasure locked up in form of signs and clues!

Wish I were a monkey!

Little did I know what I was getting into when I agreed to work in the Forest canopies. “Climb trees?”, “What do you mean?” would be the obvious response of any person who has never climbed a tree before even in the wildest of dreams! And needless to say I was no different.

Soon enough, I was in KMTR, with the harness around the waist and busy climbing up the trees in search of epiphytes. With some initial hic ups I managed to attain the comfort level in climbing trees but the hurdles to carry out the work were aplenty and as a matter of fact were taller than the trees themselves!
One day the assistant does not turn up, the other day the bus does the same and yet another day, the bike has a puncture! If none of these happen, the rain gods decide to be kind enough and burst open the clouds; thus singing an end to the work in the canopies.
With time on my side, I managed to overcome these hurdles to some extent and managed to partially finish the work and each day was invariably associated with a lot of exciting things be it the sheer contiguity of the forest canopies or the sightings of the canopy dwellers up close.

After having seen much of the diversity of life up there, I always kept wondering “why do so very few people work in this field of canopy ecology?”
Of late, I have been having experiences which seem to answer my question.
In this context, I would like to share a day’s experience which almost shattered my will to work in the canopy. The day started with a wonderful sunrise and a clear sky which was a very good indication that rain gods still in deep slumber and soon myself, Mutthu- my ever smiling assistant and Mythri- an enthusiastic undergraduate who volunteered to assist me in the work, went to the field to sample trees and what followed was one of the worst field days if may say!
First, the rigging which was done a few days back was not proper and in the effort to set it right, myself and Mutthu attached a karabiner to the free end of the nylon thread and hauled it up only to see it dangling up the tree stuck in the thick undergrowth of the selection felled forest. A hard thug and both the thread and my palm got effortlessly cut. With a heavy heart, we set to rig the tree again using the sling and it took six hard tries to finally get the thread up there with more than a dozen cuts on my palm while trying to pull the misfired thread from the understory.
When we finally got it up, the climbing ropes were quickly hauled up as we had lost more than two hours in getting the most critical part of climbing right. But we realized that the ropes were inclined in an angle and impossible to climb up and my brilliant self decided to use the laws of gravity and attached the harness itself to the rope to the hauled it up thinking the weight will drag the rope towards the bole of the tree due to gravity .But with the understory, the rope decided to defy the laws of gravity and stayed half way up the tree! No amount of tugging seemed to even budge the rope and poor muthu had to climb a short tree with calamus all around to pull the rope back to ground.
All was set and we were relived that things were in place and soon realized that the thinner ropes used to haul the rope and my backpack were so badly entangled in the leaf litter that it took a good one hour to unwind the mess but meanwhile, Mythri managed to climb up the tree.
After four hours under the tree, we finally made progress with Muthu and Mythri up the tree and me half way up. On reaching the top, we were rewarded by some excellent views of the Black eagle at eye level and the Mountain imperial pigeons flying out of Syzigium trees below us and I was also able to record calls of a canopy frog. But bad luck seemed to have climbed the tree with us, as soon as I reached up and sat down to write; the pen slipped off from my pocket and went straight down! We would have ended up writing with a marker pen if not for Giby who popped in to see how we were doing and generously sent up a pen. With a lot of branches to sample for epiphytes, we were comfortably seated on the tree for the next five hours, living on bananas for lunch and a little water. Coming down took a good one hour. The packed lunch of cold idly, equally cold sambar and stale chutney was finished in no time and later, we spent a good two hours in the night un-entangling the rigging thread.

Though the mess we had been into was largely the doing of the new nylon ropes which coiled faster than a constrictor, coiling the thinner strings beyond easy un-entanglement, I too had a considerable role to add to it due to some foolish ideas like sending up the harness itself up!
Such experiences are one of the many difficulties in accessing the canopy and carrying out rigorous research activities are surely one of the deterrents which has since long kept many people off the forest canopies and those who have pioneered this field of ecology were for sure driven by the taste for high adventure, beauty, diversity and complexity of interactions which take place within it.

At a snails’ pace!

Snails are often used as a rule of thumb to mock at the pace at which an activity or an event is occurring and when I would encounter snails of various kinds in the canopy, I used to wonder as to how long it would have taken for these slow moving creatures to reach the tree tops about 25m above where they usually live and what makes them travel so high.

No doubt that the decaying matter on the forest floor is comparatively higher than the canopy soil organic matter, something must be up there which makes them do the epic journey. And once on top, they seem to be equally at home among the moss and organic matter collected in the forks of the numerous branches radiating from often big trunk- may be this small patches offer more nutrition than the ground litter. I have often encountered these snails in the canopy and generally un- common on the floor. On would easily think like I did that the time taken by the snail to come down (if at all it does) would also be at an equally slow pace. However, I was proved wrong when I came across this strange and unique situation where the snails seemed to have seen us canopy people going up and coming down on ropes and learnt from it (or is it the other way round?). With amazing stability and dexterity, this snail was coming down from the tree top on a single thin strand of slimy mucous, like we rappel down on ropes! Though it would take days to reach the top, they seem to have evolved and adaptation over time to come down rapidly as if they too understood the Newton’s laws of gravity and it seems that an evolutionary adaptation, at least in this case has not been happening at a snails pace!

Leech (ate)

You walk with chappals in the forest? What about the snakes and leeches?
I’m sure many of us would have heard or perhaps asked Drs Ganesh and Ganesan when they are out in the field-be it the evergreens of Kakachi or the wetlands in search of birds and paddy fields in search of rodents and owls outside KMTR. They seem to be at ease taking a walk through the forest in “Hawaii” chappals. And to the above question, both laugh it off saying “well, we have been doing so and are still around!”
More than snakes, which are pretty few in numbers in the rainforests, one should be bothered about the zillions of leeches which seem to spring out of nowhere soon after a light shower. I have been witness to both of them being attacked if I can say, by not less than a couple of tens of leeches at any point of time and they unassumingly pull them off as and when they happen to stop to observe something and more often than not, Dr Ganesan carefully removes the bloodsuckers and puts them in the forest rather gently!

It so happened that when we went on a trek on Green trail with Dr Tor. Dr Ganesh, in his usual attire of chappals got a generous share of blood donation done by the middle of the day while others were protected by anti leech socks and Snuff powder. On reaching a stream, TG decided to put the ecosystem services of nature to good use and dipped both legs (one after the other of course) in the stream and to much of our amusement, not less than 200 fishes came and feasted on the blood which had clotted and dried all over his feet and in no time, his feet were as good as new with no sign of blood whatsoever only to get back to the bloodied condition in a couple of minutes later.
Though I must say I have seen Dr Ganesh with shoes at some point of time, I have never seen Dr Ganesan with shoes, both in fact say chappals are better to pick out leeches as and when they climb and are comfortable to walk with. To me however, having been brought up if I can say with camouflaged anti- leech socks when in a forest; walking with chappals, let alone Hawaii chappals sends shivers down the spine and more so, on the thought of scratching the wounds of leech bites like a rabid creature for not less than a couple of months thereafter.