Located in Alwar District, Rajasthan, Sariska Tiger Reserve used to be the hunting preserve of the Alwar estate. Spread over 880 square kilometres, this has always been an important connector of the Northern India tiger and leopard corridor. The reserve was declared a wildlife sanctuary in 1958 and a tiger reserve under the Indian government’s Project Tiger in 1979. Unfortunately, the robust population of around 28 tigers in Sariska was totally wiped out by 2003-04. Most were poached by the infamous Sansar Chand, who probably relied on the support of the local population and the still existing villages within the reserve. Whatever be the case, this unfortunate turn of events led to the vanishing of the apex level predator in the food chain in this area.

Everything is interrelated in the jungle. The demise of the tiger altered the topography of the park, resulting in a sharp increase in the population of antlers, the erstwhile favorite food of the tiger in the park. This spotted deer that I have photographed looks pretty, batting its ridiculously long lashes, but without the king of the jungle, rising deer populations decimated grasslands and shrubs. The resultant forest degradation made the habitat even more difficult for wildlife to survive and thrive.

In 2009, Sariska became the first reserve in the world where tigers were successfully relocated. These were the first tigers this thorny, arid scrub forest had seen in years. The joy was, however, short-lived. The first reintroduced male tiger died after feeding on a poisoned cattle carcass and relocated tigresses did not breed as expected. Was the forest too stressed because of human activity for it to regenerate and tigers to flourish once more?

Things started looking up by 2012, when a female tigress named ST-2 was sighted with cubs. Sansar Chand died in 2014 and poaching activities slowed down. Better forest management techniques were subsequently enforced and big cats started making a slow comeback. Relocation of six villages from the core areas reduced human activity inside the jungle. This improved the habitat and gave tigers much needed space to move about freely. 

Sariska has become a success story with the tiger population going up steadily. 23 tigers live here now, including three cubs. The enforced lockdown has given an unexpected and happy boost to the conservation efforts at the Park. This year, I have seen several individuals, including ST9, ST3 and ST6. Since September 2021, ST21 and ST9 have been courting. Hopefully their courtship will herald some good news for conservationists here!

In architecture, the keystone at the top of an arch holds the arch together. Without the keystone, the whole arch and building surrounding collapses! Tigers are regarded as keystone species in their habitat. The return of tigers to Sariska has had an immeasurable impact on its biodiversity and ecological health. 

Today, the slow but steady repopulation of tigers in Sariska holds important lessons in the viability of such rewilding programs. Do radio collars around the neck hinder breeding success? Can rewilding be successful in forests with a lot of human activity? Are some tigers more efficient breeders than others? And what can be done to improve the survival rate of tiger cubs? Perhaps the answers to such questions will bring greater focus and success to species reintroduction programs across the world. 

In the meantime, Sariska has become my favourite weekend destination from Delhi to get a quick and wholesome experience of these majestic creatures in the wild!

Author: Devendra Singh, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Devendra Singh

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We think of Delhi as a concrete jungle, which, indubitably, it is. However, the city is on the tail end of the Aravallis and their forests, many of which are, happily, in different stages of rewilding. Recent surveys of these forests show that they harbour an astonishingly rich diversity of wildlife with relatively high densities of mammals in non-protected areas. As someone who has been documenting life in these forests over the last few decades, I have, in recent times, chronicled many species that used to be rare to find and can now be spotted.

The growing awareness about the conservation and protection of Delhi’s urban forests is a welcome breath of fresh air for conservationists and wildlife lovers like me. Much more needs to be done but I am happy that in my years as a chronicler of the city’s animals, I have got to see some of these amazing species return to their lost habitats.

Author: Devendra Singh, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Devendra Singh

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A Welsh folk poem dating back to the 14th century Derwen Ceubren yr Ellyll, or ‘The Hollow Oak, Haunt of Demons’ tells of an ancient oak that bears witness to the betrayal of Welsh revolutionary Owain Glyndŵr by his cousin and English royalist Hywel Sele, supporter of King Henry IV. The cousins embark on a deer-hunting trip, when Hywel turns his sword on Owain, who has suspected his motives and worn chainmail. In a fight to the death, Hywel is vanquished by Owain and:

“Pale lights on Cader’s rocks were seen,
And midnight voices heard to moan;
‘Twas even said the Blasted Oak,
Convulsive, heaved a hollow groan…”

Owain conceals Hywel’s body in the old oak’s great trunk and never tells of the murder, only bespoken by the oak, which grows gnarled and twisted in its dark knowledge until, many years later, Hywel Sele’s widow leads a band of men to split the oak’s great bole to find her husband’s body within, a rusting sword clutched in its skeletal hand.

Hallowed by the Celts, great oaks traditionally served as meeting spots and boundary-markers to Welsh wayfarers in an era when upland oak woodland – dominated by sessile oak (Quercus petraea) and local pedunculate oak (Quercus robur) and typically supporting 500-plus plant and animal species as well as other trees such as alder, ash, birch, hazel, holly, and rowan – covered much of Wales’ landmass.

These days woodland only covers 14 percent of the current land surface in Wales (in comparison to a European average of 37 percent), and as of 1998, only 38 percent of Welsh woodland was composed of native species such as oak (Welsh Assembly Government, 2013). This process of gradual deforestation is thought to be down to many factors, including destruction of woodlands during English King Edward I’s seizing of Welsh territories and the hunting-to-extinction of apex predators such as the Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx), European brown bear (Ursus arctos) and the grey wolf (Canis lupis) from the early to late middle ages (700s to 1500s) resulting in an irruption of herbivores that devoured emergent tree saplings.

The final crisis point for many of Wales’ upland oak woodlands were the World Wars, when a rapacious appetite for timber led to upland oak woodlands being force purchased by the British government’s Forestry Commission, felled and in many cases replanted with non-native fast-growing conifers.

One woodland’s tale: Gigrin Prysg

I’m standing in a stretch of upland oak woodlands in a region of mid-Wales whose fate charts the turbulent fate of Wales’ upland oak woodlands. From its slanting escarpments are visible the brooding blues of the Cambrian Mountains and the sheening dams and reservoirs of the Elan and Claerwen Valleys; brushing my ankles as I walk along the woodland’s steep-inclined pathways are mauve heather, fronded ferns and bushes of bilberries, a tiny dark berry that makes a fine late summer pie.

“Those are good indicator species that this is ancient woodland,” says Marc Liebrecht, a Sustainable Forest Management specialist who maintains Gigrin Prysg for Sacred Groves. “As are the lichens that you see on the oaks over there, such as wood bristle-moss and old man’s beard lichen.”

An 11.8 acre stretch of mature oak woodland, Gigrin Prysg translates as ‘Gigrin’s grove’, for an 18th century local farm owner. Its ancient trees were felled, Liebrecht believes, for World War Two timber and have since grown back and reseeded naturally from dropped acorns, in higgledy piggledy patches and clusters of oaks.

The oaks also support the growth of rowan and birch trees in the gaps in the canopy left by this natural dispersal of saplings. Deadwood left to rot on the site provides a home for species including blue ground beetle (Carabus intricatus) and crane fly (Lipsothrix errans).

The lack of ruminant grazing on the site will allow further trees to grow from the tender saplings at our feet, Liebrecht says, as Sacred Groves plan to leave the woodland to rewild and reseed naturally, with the help of supporters.

Regenerating Wales’ lost woodlands is, Liebrecht admits, a long game. Easily felled, oaks grow slowly (at around 50cm a year), and it’s hard to predict if pests or erratic weather conditions borne of climate change will threaten the viability of this native species, as has been seen with Ash dieback (Hymenoscyphus fraxineus), a fungus that arrived on British soil in 2012 and which is predicted to kill 80 percent of native ash trees (including a patch on the western edge of the Gigrin Prysg site).

“For dynamic resilience you need mixed wooded ecosystems with different species and ages of tree, and you need time,” says Liebrecht, gesturing at Gigrin Prysg’s boughs. Gigrin Prysg’s venerable Welsh oaks will live, he predicts, to witness other tall tales.

Author: Sally Howard, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Sally Howard and Hollow Oak illustrations out of copyright

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How do you protect a padauk tree in Gabon, central Africa, from illegal logging? Bore a sharp metal tube into its dark red trunk. In a pioneering new conservation project, specially trained samplers drive the gadget called a Pickering Punch into a living padauk tree at waist height. The precious sample they extract then makes a long journey to scientists at Kew Gardens in south-west London for analysis.

Along with organisations including the Forest Stewardship Council in the US, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew is part of WorldForestID, an international effort to stop the fraudulent timber trade. This is the wood that ends up as furniture, flooring and paper, but whose identity and provenance is little understood with existing databases of geo-referenced wood samples being limited and documentation poor.

According to the European Union, between 20 percent and 40 percent of the global timber trade comes from illegal sources, and costs the governments of developing countries between €10-€15bn [US$12bn to $18bn] a year in lost revenues, while decimating native forests, reducing habitat for wildlife and depressing world timber prices. Rosewood alone comprises 35 percent of the monetary value of confiscated illegal wildlife trade, according to WorldForestID.

WorldForestID is trying to tackle this by answering two questions, says Dr Peter Gasson, wood anatomist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew: What is the identity of the wood and where was it grown? “First of all, we need adequate reference wood samples from which to derive data, and then we can address these two questions,” he says.

The project is complicated by the fact that trees are harvested in one place, transported through one or more countries, and only then processed into manufactured products: oak furniture and flooring imported into the USA and Europe, for example, often comprising several species of white oak from North America and the Russian Far East.

Back in Gabon, the Pickering Punch has worked its magic and the sample is dried and packed off to Kew’s Plant Quarantine Unit, where it’s inspected for contamination. It’s then frozen at -40 degrees centigrade for 72 hours to kill any invertebrates with the sample’s origin. Then the process of identity verification begins.

It’s relatively easy for an expert to identify the genus by eye or hand lens, or using a microscope. But like the forests they’re trying to protect, the population of expert anatomists is in decline. Automated machine learning is being developed by the team to meet this human shortfall. Routes to identification include chemical analysis, DNA sequencing, and stable isotope ratio analysis, which can shed light on the environment the tree has grown in, as well as its age.

To counter the risk of samples being given fraudulent geo-locations, the WFID smartphone app used by samplers in the field, has a time-stamp feature, and GPS coordinates that can’t be overridden.

Getting the data is one thing. Then comes the challenge of getting traders, legislators, scientists and timber consumers to embrace science-based wood authentication. WorldForest ID is optimistic about the prospects. “We envisage the day that scientific methods will be used routinely and successfully by timber traders, manufacturers, retailers and law enforcement to accept or reject identity and provenance claims on internationally traded timber and forest products, and to support prosecutions when laws are infringed,” a spokesperson says.

Author: Clare Dowdy, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: ©FSC International / Loa Dalgaard Worm and Kew

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Plant a tree and save the planet; or so we’re told. Well you might be surprised to discover that not all tree planting is good tree planting. A tree planted in the wrong location can block watercourses or provide a wider vantage for predators of endangered species; it can even, in the case of tree-planting in ancient moor and peatlands, release carbon deposits that have safely been stored in the soil for decades, or longer.

“It’s about planting the right trees in the right location to maximise environmental benefits,” says Alice Crosby, Project Officer of a smart tree-planting project in Nidderdale in the Yorkshire Dales, funded by British conservation charity the Woodland Trust. “An example of good planting would be around existing woodlands to create a new space for wildlife to expand their habitats. Poor planting would be in important habitats such as our heathland and moorlands, which already support rare species and contribute significantly to the UK’s targets for carbon sequestration.” In Nidderdale, bad planting has historically opened species of wading birds, such as the endangered curlew, to predation.

With around eight percent tree cover, Nidderdale is typical of British regions in having undergone historical waves of deforestation followed, after the 20th century’s two World Wars, by a programme of replanting of commercial woods such as conifers; with British fuel security, rather than conservation, in view. More recently, tree planting in the region was on landowners’ instigation, with local authorities only stepping in when these projects were on a large scale.

The idea with Nidderdale’s digital Woodland Opportunity Map says Nidderdale Biodiversity Officer Kelly Harmar, is to “flip that process and make it much less passive”. With 70 different factors accounted for, and data drawn from everywhere from grassroots volunteers taking soil samples to Google metrics, the accessible, traffic-light coded online map means Nidderdale can approach landowners, such as private utilities company Yorkshire Water, with the argument for tree-planting in a given spot.

This is where Crosby comes in, her remit being to approach landowners with data on where to plant, as well as advice on how to best withstand the exposed conditions of the Dales. Thanks to hymenoscyphus fraxineus, a chronic fungal disease that’s killing ash trees across the European continent, ash cannot be planted. Beeches, poorly suited to the exposed conditions of the Dales, are overplanted too. Instead Crosby often advises landowners to plant hardy varietals such as the downy birch.

“The idea is to combat climate change but also make the landscape more resilient, meaning that wildlife can thrive and move around more as it’s not impeded by poor tree planting,” Crosby explains.

The beauty of the map’s layered data is that it captures information across the seasons. “If you visit a spot during winter tree-planting season, for example, you wouldn’t know that migratory birds arrive there in summer,” Harmar adds. “A tool like this, that looks at historical data over a number of years, can tease out the sites where ecosystems might be most at risk.”

The team claims that Scandinavian countries such as Finland, with its 60 percent tree cover, much of which is ancient woodland, are their inspiration. Crosby is also documenting the patches of tree cover which are formed of ancient woodland, which has thrived on the same spot for millennia and is host to a range of ancient flora and fauna, including rare fungi, wild garlic and May-blooming bluebell fields. Surprisingly, the locations of these ancient habitats are poorly recorded, even in national archives.

With many of Nidderdale’s mid-war conifer woods approaching their 80-year harvest time, the plan is to replant hardy native species to 12 percent regional forest cover in the next decade, says Harmar. The Woodland Opportunity Map is a big part of this strategy and is being received well. “We only launched the map in October, but the landowners are responding positively and discussing where we might site trees in the next winter planting season,” Crosby says. The project, of course, is only effective if it inspires landowners to plant trees.

Beyond the arguments from data, the team’s loftier hope is to restore Britain’s woodland culture. “British people used to be woodland people and I think we’re rediscovering what we always knew: that forests are great for the planet, but also essential for our mental and physical health,” Crosby says, adding that her favourite forested spot is Hack Fall, where Victorian follies peep between ancient boughs.

Author: The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Nidderdale AONB Autumn Colours by David Tolcher

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