Running Away from Elephants: The Adventures of a Wildlife Biologist 9387164942, 9789387164949

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Running Away ELEPHANTS Adventures w a Wildlife Biologist ’A I •/

Foreword by:'

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Jairam Ramesh -‘The memoirs o£a self-confessed maverick " ”,"yt vildlife biologist, full of fascinating information, and stories told with Rauf's inimitable < austic humour. A must for wildlife lovers and. ^11 J ; who enjoy a unique'read.’ ’ •.TULLY; '*

Beginning with his interactions with

Dr Salifn Ali, the legendary ornithologist— who was also his grand-uncle—wildlife

biologist RaufAU takes the reader on a journey through India J natural history

and the beginning ofecological studies in India. Rauf was one of the first Indians to complete a PhD in wildlife biology—he researched the social behaviour of bonnet macaques in the forests of Mundanthurai region in Tamil Nadu. In the late 1980s, he was instrumental in setting up one of India’s first Masters programmes in ecology, and later, as an ecologist; .Rauf undertook the task of delineating Protected Areas in the Palani Hills of the Western Ghats. He was also among the first to conduct environmental research in the Andaman and Nicobar Islandsy and in this bopk» he provides eye-opening information , on‘the environmental damage caused by. the"/ mtipduction of chital and other species alien to “ '* ‘iff’■ •v*r**k•*.L ' w >Vr* * '*• ‘

Enlivening the narrative are anecdotes drawh from a career spanning over three decades:- ’ ‘ of encountering wild elephants; dealing with red tape; and whiskey-laced brainstorming sessions with students and Nobel laureates alike.

Through these personal accounts, Rauf reveals the state of environmental conservation in India, and the complex relationship between locals, wildlife researchers and forest officials. He also emergfS:a$aperson who was influential in creating polices for the conservation of the environment an(fwho had little patience for

the corruption and bureaucratic processes that came in the way. Quirky, candid and informative, Running Away from Elephants is an invaluable addition to writings on natural history in India:

ELEPHANTS The Adventures &■

February 2018

Preface This is most definitely not an autobiography. That is for famous people, and I’m not one. Anyway, most people live dull drab lives, even the famous ones. They are just better at marketing than the rest of us. However, in between the dull and drab phases there have been interesting places visited, and amusing people met. The people have sometimes been famous, and sometimes even obnoxious. I try to describe some of them. I shall probably get sued anyway. I was fortunate enough to have begun my career as a wildlife biologist when this discipline was in its infancy in India, and observe the beginning of environmentalism here. Much of this tribe sucks, frankly. However, exciting ideas were generated, and some mistakes made by all concerned. I share some of these. I also try and share some of the joys of being a biologist, together with some of the issues that we are grappling with. Cutting through all the justification, finally the book arose out of a drunken conversation with a few fellow biologists camping out in the wilds, who said I should try and put some of the entertaining stories we were exchanging on paper.

Into the Wet End ‘But you can’t kick down every door in the universe. And we have more pressing matters to attend to.’ —Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

The path I followed reached a little stream. A log thrown across the stream served as a bridge; and the drop to the stream bed, covered with sharp-edged rocks, was high enough to frighten. It then curved left: and up, going diagonally across the hill face. After fifteen minutes it looped around and began traversing the hillside, which was steep on both sides of the path. Massive trees bordered the path. The fog had thickened and made it difficult to see more than a few metres ahead. This was my first time alone in a rainforest and I didn’t like it one bit. Suddenly a great grey shape loomed out of the mist in front of me, trumpeting. I leapt off the path, lost my footing and went stumbling and lurching down the slope. The grey shape rapidly resolved itself into an elephant. The elephant ran past where I fell off the path, in the direction from which I had come. An adrenalin rush like I’d never experienced before hit me. I sat huddled for an hour, till I was sure the elephant had gone. I then very gingerly went back the way I had come, peeping around every corner. After what seemed an eternity I reached Sengaltheri Forest Rest House, the place that was to be my home for the next couple of years. I decided that this life—filled with nasty brutish animals that frightened one in unexpected ways—was not for me. I would pack up, go back to Bombay, and do a degree in business management. The previous day had been traumatic. John Oates, my field supervisor, had dropped me at the bottom of the hill as

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the road up to the rest house had washed away in the rains. We found a road crew to carry my stuff up to the rest house, where a boy had been employed to cook for me. Not sharing a language, we communicated with gestures. Since it was raining he couldn’t get the fire lit. I kept moving all night from one part of the room to another as three distinct parts of the roof were leaking: one dripped when it was raining heavily, another came into play when it was drizzling and a third spot after it stopped raining. Not much sleep there. I woke up the next morning to thick fog. However, since I’d come here to study monkeys, I went off to find some—and found the elephant instead. Or did it find me, I wonder? When I got to Sengaltheri the cook managed to convey, using crude sign language, that the river below the rest house had risen and couldn’t be crossed. We were cut off for five days. I had five days to get used to the forest and because there was nothing else to do I explored the whole area, found monkeys, followed them and decided that they were interesting. On the fifth day a couple of Oates’ assistants made it to Sengaltheri; John had very thoughtfully sent a packet of cigarettes with them. By this time I’d also started enjoying being alone in the forest. I never discussed the MBA with anybody after that. Initial Days at Sengaltheri Once it stopped raining, I walked back down to Kalakad town from Sengaltheri. Magically, porters appeared in the forest when they were required. Three hours down the mountain we reached the town, and suddenly there were people, cows and buses. Sengaltheri was definitely better. This was one of the first conversations I had: an elderly gentleman came running out of a house on the border of the town and asked, ‘Excuse me, sir, but are you a central

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government official studying lifestyles of peoples of the Tirunelveli district?’ I burst out laughing. He walked off in a huff. Then it was back to Kakachi on a nearby tea estate, with John Oates. This time around he realized I didn’t know how to drive a car. I was supposed to take charge of the jeep when he left. We had our first driving lesson that lasted fifteen minutes. A thoroughly rattled John got off, saying it was too dangerous to sit in the car while I was learning, especially on those treacherous mountain roads. However, I could just practice by myself. Which I did, by driving round and round the little golf course in the tea estate. Even if I drove off the road there was no place to get hurt, and there was no traffic. So I survived, and learned—rather fast, because the jeep was left with me soon after. After a few days I went to the plains again, this time to another part of the sanctuary, the Mundanthurai plateau. To get here, a sojourn through the town ofVickramasinghepuram (abbreviated by everyone to VK Puram) was necessary. This was one of the most congested towns in the area and every time we drove through it we wondered how we had passed through unscathed. However, the denizens of South Indian villages appear to melt away magically as vehicles approach. The road burst out of the town suddenly into an expanse of rice fields, crossed a river, and suddenly the hills began and with them was the entrance to the wildlife sanctuary. The road climbed along a hill face which overlooked the town and the fields surrounding it, and then went through a cleft in the hills to enter a bowl-shaped valley, through which the Thambraparni river flowed. At the other end of the valley there were four enormous silver-coloured pipes going down the hillside, into a building at the bottom that was the power generation house

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for the Lower Thambraparni Dam built in 1935. Next to the pipes was a large sheet of rock that meandered down the hillside. This must have been a magnificent waterfall before the dam was built, and I was once fortunate enough to see it in full flow but it was during a cyclone. The road skirted the valley and after a series of sharp turns, crossed the pipes, went through another cleft and reached the village of Papana^un Lower Dam, which was to become my base a few years later. It then went through yet another cleft to cross another low range of hills and entered a plateau. This plateau had larger trees than the scrub forest up till now, but a lot of this had been replaced with teak plantations. Over the next few kilometres we saw a few spotted deer. The road then crossed a bridge and we turned off to a magnificent twostoried structure by the riverside. The Mundanthurai Forest Rest House was to be my home for the next year and a half. The building had been constructed in 1892, and alterations were made in the 1930s to convert its single bedroom into two. Both upstairs and downstairs were essentially one large room with a verandah going around this room on three sides. In both places, one end of the verandah had a bathroom while the other had a spare room, which doubled as spare sleeping accommodation. I was given the downstairs one: a room that was to actually become home during my stay there. Near the rest house there were a lot of dilapidated structures. Local forest staff occupied two of them, a couple of hundred metres away. The rest remained empty as even though there were a number of persons posted here, nobody actually stayed here. They came in their uniforms only when some senior functionary visited. When I went out the first evening a boy followed me. He spoke a little English so conversation was possible. He was

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the son of a forest guard posted there. He flooded me with a barrage of questions about what I was trying to do. What was so special about these monkeys? They were the same as any other monkey anywhere. So what if they lived in the forest? Isn’t that what monkeys were supposed to do? Of course the males were bigger than the females, this was the natural order of things. He listened to whatever I had to say and the questions became sharper. He started making astute remarks about what was going on in the group. My problem of finding somebody to help me with the study at Mundanthurai was solved instantly: this was Narayana, who has since, among other things, acquired two Masters degrees, got a doctorate, been a teaching fellow at Harvard University and worked at the Audobon Society. My research was supposed to be on bonnet monkeys, actually one of the commonest monkeys in Southern India. They are the nasty little animals that walk up to you on the road, snatch food from your hand, and threaten you with ugly faces if you have the temerity to object. Up the river from Mundanthurai, I found a group of bonnet monkeys that seemed untouched by humanity. Initially they wouldn’t let me approach. Later the younger animals would come and peer at me. The older animals took a bit longer, but soon most of them settled down and would ignore me at fairly close distances. With the exception of one old female with a missing tail, they all rapidly treated me as part of the landscape. They would run away whenever they saw other humans, with the exception of Narayana. They would see him bringing me things to eat, items at least some of them associated with food. Soon they settled down, and as days passed they allowed me to come closer and closer. The group had fourteen animals in it. There were two

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males, one well past his prime—an obviously crotchety and bad-tempered type. There were two sub-adult males, both constantly straying from the group. Both used to occasionally carry7 infants around—strange behaviour for a male monkey. There were four females, all with very different personalities. Again, one was old and bad tempered. Another would constantly forget her infant and leave him behind at awkward places, to be retrieved, usually, by one of the young males. And then there were a variety of juveniles of various sizes. Two more were born during the study. I developed Sengaltheri as the second field site. The rest house was leaky and dilapidated, but the view was out of this world. One could look down the forest from around a thousand metres high, down to the plains and across them to the sea about 50 kilometres away. The lighthouse at Tuticorin could be seen every night, and also the harbour, on a clear day. Once I’d settled into the rest house and made it just barely liveable, the forest department woke up both to the fact that it was actually being used, and that the location was fantastic. However, the rest house was uninhabitable by any civilized norms: it had a leaky roof, no bathrooms, no kitchen, and no furniture except for a string cot with broken strings. So they decided to rebuild it. I had to move out and live in a tent on a narrow bit of land between the building and a drop in front, while it was being rebuilt. At the same time the road up the hill was extended all the way to the rest house. The plan then was to take the road right through the rainforest and link it up with the road going into the tea estate, which would have meant destroying an 8-kilometre-long swathe of rainforest. Luckily, good sense prevailed in this case. Around this time I had my second elephant experience. One night I heard a noise outside the tent. I opened the flap

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of the tent and peered out. Lo and behold, there was a dark shape looming over the tent, and producing loud sniffling noises. Jumbo was sni fling away at the tent. There was no place to run, and even if there had been, there was no way I could have outrun the animal with the short distance between us. Terror took over and I pulled the blanket over my head and lay there shivering. After a couple of minutes—which seemed like hours—he must have decided that he had spread enough alarm and despondency for the time being, and went away. I wasn t very comfortable thereafter in that tent, but there was a decided lack of choices at the time. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s go back to where it all started.

Beginnings 'Knowledge is just opinion you trust enough to act upon. —Orson Scott Card, Children of the Mind

The first wildlife incident I remember is from when I was four years old. We lived in Agra for a while then as my father had a business there. We stayed very close to the monument of Sikandra (Emperor Akbar’s tomb). There was a large

hanuman langur that hung around the entrance. This monkey had his food-gathering techniques worked out in a method that employed deep psychological insights. Whenever there were Indian tourists the monkey would walk up to them and hold out his hand, exactly as the beggars outside did. He would be rewarded, usually, with a few peanuts. If the tourists were foreigners, the technique changed. He would charge at them, screaming. Whereupon they would also scream, drop the peanuts and run! There would then be, obviously, an abundance of food for the next few minutes, as this animal and his cronies gobbled it. Come to think of it, this was also my first encounter with racism. The house in which I grew up in Bombay (before they corrupted its name) was a very large one, with a garden complete with lawns, and a multitude of trees, mainly mango. My grandparents lived upstairs. My parents, brother, sister and I lived downstairs. My grandfather had built the house in the 1920s in Pali Hill, which was then jungle; leopards had apparently been seen there until the late 1930s. It had become fashionable by the time we lived there, with a multitude of film stars and their associated riffraff having moved in. In one room on the side of the house that had its own

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occasionally used entrance, there was an old man who lived in a room just packed with books. There were books everywhere. Every wall was lined with shelves, higher than one could reach. There were tables all over the room, again stacked with piles of books and papers, a couple of feet high in most places. In the middle, there was a desk with a tiny space open in front, and a typewriter attached to the side, where the old man could always be found. This was Salim Ali, my grandmother’s brother. He wrote books on birds. A lot has been written about him. What seems to have been omitted, in all the accounts I’ve read on him, are his fierce temper and his many eccentricities. The slightest noise and the old man would be out there, screaming at us. Also for eating too many sweets for dessert, for expressing opinions he didn’t agree with, and for criticizing his good friend Indira Gandhi. The stories about him are legion. He would insist on driving his own car until he was well into his seventies, and by this time he was a menace on the roads. While out with him one evening, we were stopped after he drove through a red light. By the time he was through, the cop was apologizing for the location of the traffic light. Normally, though, he rode a motorcycle. This was an antique Sunbeam with a sidecar attached. He had driven it to Helsinki for a conference in 1956. It was in use until he was in his seventies, when my grandmother made him sell it. An incident related by my cousin Vaseem was their setting off for a long field trip just after the Second World War, when petrol rationing was still in force. A special permit was obtained and jerry cans were strapped onto the roof. At the first checkpoint they were stopped and the petrol permit checked, putting Salim in a vile mood. At the second checkpoint they were waved through. The old man stopped,

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shouted at the man for not doing his job, insisted he check their permit, and then yelled at him again for not noticing the gun racks on the roof and checking their gun licenses. He would be up at five and work until eight. This would be followed by breakfast and the newspaper, and work until one. This was followed by lunch and listening to the news on All India Radio. At six he would wind up and go for a long walk. Everybody in the neighbourhood knew him by sight; nobody knew who he was until the advent of television much later. Sometimes the walk would be skipped and instead he would take out an air rifle and shoot crows in the garden. This behaviour continued even when he was well into his eighties. A fact that was known only to people who knew him well was that he was totally deaf in one ear. While meeting new people, he would sit in such a way that the deaf ear was towards them, unless he was instantly interested in what they were saying. He would carry on with whatever he was doing, muttering, ‘Yes, No? Is that so? Accha!’ at regular intervals. Sometimes he would get the response wrong and thoroughly confuse the person talking to him while the rest of us tried to suppress our giggles. Unfortunately the deafness was a tremendous disadvantage to him while birdwatching, because he had difficulty in pinpointing the location of a bird from its calls. Telephone calls were also a problem because he couldn’t hear properly over the phone, and we were trained to say that he had gone out when he didn’t want to rake the call. If, as did happen in later years, somebody like Indira Gandhi or her office staff telephoned, one of us would be on the telephone as the intermediary while becoming extremely nervous to boot. Obviously, birds, their differences, how to identify them (each misidentification would be greeted by a paroxysm of

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rage), and how to spot them, were drilled into us from the time we were six years old. We were also encouraged to walk into his room and look at the books in his library whenever we wanted. An incident from early childhood comes to mind. Salim, my cousin Shama, who was about twelve at the time, and I had gone birdwatching. An Indian robin flew out of a hedge. Look, said Shama, it has a nest there. This provoked a tirade: Indian robins don’t nest in places like that, learn how to be scientific and stop making these inane remarks. After listening to this with wide eyes, Shama walked up to the hedge and pointed out the nest. This sparked off a bitter denunciation of both of us, and how we had set him up just to embarrass him! The other major influence in my choice of career was my maternal uncle Humayun Abdulali, who lived nearby. Incidentally, he was better at identifying birds than Salim was, something Salim readily acknowledged. The two of them, however, didn’t like each other and hardly spoke to each other. I can remember only one occasion when I’d gone birdwatching with both together, to Sagargadh Fort. I was very young then but I still remember the tension. The tension originated from their differing views on what sort of research the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) should be conducting. Both had been honorary secretaries of the organization, and both had, essentially, devoted their lives to it. The BNHS had one of the finest collections of bird and mammal skins in India, and funds had been obtained for maintaining them. Humayun felt that since very little was known about bird taxonomy—i.e. distinct species of birds—research efforts should be concentrated on this. Salim thought that field research on ecology was more important,

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and staff employed for maintaining the collections were sent off on field projects. This was bitterly resisted by Humayun, but Salim, as the more well-known figure, won out in the committee meetings. The committee meetings used to get extremely acrimonious and once Humayun slapped another committee member who’d called him a ‘bloody swine’—he was religious enough to take extreme umbrage at this. In this process the staff of the BNHS had to pick sides. The bulk supported Salim. The levels of pettiness that people descended to was incredible, with Humayun being deprived of a PhD because one of the staff members on Bombay University’s evaluation committee objected to it on grounds other than scientific. I would listen to both of them while managing not to express an opinion. They patched up a few months before Salim died in 1987; both of them bitterly regretted the years when they hadn’t communicated. Humayun’s son Akbar (my cousin, not the emperor and more important as far as I was concerned) and I were the same age. I would often accompany them on weekends when Humayun went hunting for duck and partridge. We would go within about 150 kilometres of Bombay, and I became very familiar with the countryside. At a mere hours drive from Bombay there was forest. The pond in the middle of what is now Panvel city was a great place for hunting duck. Ghodbunder, on Bassein Creek (now Vasai), was another forested area. Kalyan and Bhiwandi were mere villages, as was Alibagh. This countryside has become an urban sprawl now. Besides the regular shikar, anything unusual was shot and skinned, and brought back to the BNHS for identification. Unfortunately, the restrictive laws regarding hunting make even the collection of museum specimens problematic today.

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A relative, about five generations ago or longer, had walked into an auction in Bombay in the 1880s, heard that there was a piece of land for sale in a place he had never heard of, and pawned his wife’s jewellery to buy it. Family history appears to record that he got soundly thrashed for this by his wife. However, when they visited the place they fell in love with it, and their relatives also bought land there. Soon various members of the family owned an almost contiguous several kilometres long stretch of beach front land. Every summer we would go to this place: Kihim, on the mainland coast south of Bombay, for a month during our school vacations. The journey there used to take almost a day from Bombay. One had to go to Thana (now Thane), cross over to the mainland, and then negotiate extremely bad roads over about 150 kilometres. The bottleneck was a ferry that could introduce a delay of up to six hours. So once we went there even the working men would stay almost the whole month and it was a real holiday. Now of course with new bridges and improved roads it is less than two hours from Bombay by car, and an hour by boat across the harbour from the Gateway of India, making it a weekend hangout. A primary occupation here would be birdwatching, almost every morning. A surprising number of my relatives were involved in this, and there was always somebody to ask when something new was spotted. Apart from the birds on the coast, there were some great patches of forest slightly inland, as well as mangroves along the creeks. Until I first visited the Andaman Islands, I had always thought mangroves were small stunted plants rarely exceeding a metre in height, for these were all we got here. However, there were interesting birds in them, such as kingfishers. The imperative to watch animals was strengthened very considerably.

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Apart from this, the major sport was playing hide and seek. We would form teams, sometimes as large as a dozen a team, and plot strategies. Each game had complicated rules and points. These games would last hours. I don’t see people playing this game nowadays, one of the disadvantages of living in a concrete jungle

A Sea ofDucks When I was twelve, Salim invited me to come to Bharatpur with him. This would be my first time away from home without parents. The old man was then in his seventies and not exactly known for his tolerance of children. My parents very grudgingly agreed. The BNHS team that worked there every winter was leaving around the same time, so I travelled with them. We stayed at one of the palace guest houses, as guests of the maharaja of Bharatpur. This was before the princes lost their privy purses in 1971, and they used to Eve in style. The bedrooms had enormous four-poster beds. A liveried gendeman brought tea in the morning on what appeared to be a silver platter. We occasionally encountered the maharaja himself; I remember him thrusting drinks at Salim during a dinner party, the response was: not in public. This apparently was a long-standing joke since Salim was a teetotaller—he said he didn’t like the taste. The days used to be spent inside the sanctuary, and normally we would leave early in the morning, and come back late in the evening. This set the pattern for every October and December vacation until I finished school. Whether it was ten days or a month, I would head up to Bharatpur. In October the storks would just be finishing nesting. The trees on the lake would each have dozens of nests—storks, egrets, cormorants,