By Kausik Banerjee

Large carnivores have always been a source of fascination for people and our relationships with them vary from awe and inspiration to fear and loathing. More than any other animals, carnivores have forced us to move from ecosystem theory to ecosystem management and conservation with a focal shift from species to systems and from science vs. management to science and management. Large carnivores often provide the ultimate test of society’s willingness to conserve wildlife and thus have traditionally served as a charismatic conservation flagship worldwide. Nevertheless, recent assessments of the conservation status of carnivores present an alarming picture of ongoing declines and range contractions.  Although carnivore conservation across the globe -- and particularly in an agrarian country like India -- is fraught with human dominations of potential habitats, poaching and fragmentation, the Gir lions in the westernmost state of Gujarat, India, have an altogether different story to narrate. 

By Divya Ramesh

When my grandfather used to leave little morsels of grain for the crows (who represent forefathers according to the Hindu culture) every morning, along with the crows there would always be a cautious furry squirrel or two partaking in the free food. This three-striped palm squirrel, favourably called anil in Tamil, had me bewitched from the first time I saw it, with its shifty eyes, always ready to scurry away at the slightest suspicion of danger. I would gawk at it until all the grain was gone, and eagerly wait for the next morning. With my grandfather's passing, no one else practised this ritual and with time, I guess I forgot about it too. I like to believe that it was this experience as a child that somehow subconsciously stayed with me and resurfaced almost 17 years later when I was running out of time to figure out a masters' thesis project at the Wildlife Institute of India (WII).

I saw the Indian desert jird for the first time in Kachchh, Gujarat, during a short holiday that quickly turned into a reconnaissance for the project. These were social rodents that lived in an underground burrow system that I'm sure requires in-depth (at least up to a metre!) understanding of soil architecture. Their popping in and out of different burrow holes every few minutes reminded me of the arcade game Whac-A-Mole I'd seen in movies, of course without the violent excitement of wanting to hit the creature on the head! I tried to see how close I could go before they would run down the burrows, and they were surprisingly tame, especially if I was so slow as to appear unmoving. It was love at first sight, for me at least; I'm not sure they felt the same way. I wanted to study animal behaviour and the jirds looked very promising.

By Sahas Barve

The King Cobra Telemetry Project initiated at the Agumbe Rainforest Research Station in Karnataka and carried out between 2008-2011, was the first radio telemetry study of snakes in India. The study took field biologists deep into the rainforests of the Western Ghats. They tracked these large serpents through pouring rain, across deep swamps and up steep mountains. Surprisingly, the snakes also led the researchers through villages and people’s backyards. This unraveled a unique co-existence, where these snakes, which eat and control populations of other venomous snakes, live in close proximity to the people who revere them as holy without much conflict. Three years of following king cobras has thrown up a wealth of new information on their movement and ranging patterns, behavior, diet and social interactions in the wild. All these data are crucial for a better understanding of king cobra ecology and invaluable for designing a conservation plan for the species. I was lucky to be a part of the king cobra telemetry project, which gave me a rare insight into the day-to-day lives of these magnificent snakes and also helped uncover the harmful effects of a commonly used snake control practice.