Think of the Cotswolds countryside and what springs to mind? Green, sheep-dotted fields? Honey-stone cottages? Neatly tended gardens with flower beds in full summer bloom? What about lawns and verges that sprawl unmown as they sprout daisies, clover and that most reviled of gardeners’ weeds, the shock-haired common dandelion?

One Cotswolds village has challenged British gardeners to cast aside their famous prediction for neatly trimmed lawns and rigorous weeding of unwanted plants. Tysoe’s journey began in spring 2019, when a handful of its residents refrained from mowing their lawns during May, the month when emerging bumblebees and hoverflies are feeding on the rich nectar of wild plant species such as dandelion, bluebells and cowslips. The campaign, dubbed #NoMowMay, was first proposed by British wild plant conservation charity Plantlife in 2019, as a way to protect endangered species as well as the fast-disappearing natives that feed on wildflower nectar and whose populations are threatened by factors including global warming.

In Tysoe, locals took to it with gusto: sowing wild flower seeds, refraining from mowing and installing Brian May, a scarecrow who inadvertently resembled the legendary guitarist with British rock group Queen, to deter birds from pecking at wildflower seeds and shoots.

“The effort has been growing every year since,” Rosemary Collier, one of the project’s local coordinators and an entomologist at Warwick University. “The idea to make space for nature came from members of the church and we first rewilded parts of the churchyard. Then the parish council came on board and we re-wilded some of the parish’s verges. We also harvested seeds from local native wildflowers and sowed these alongside yellow rattle, which is semi-parasitic and suppresses grass, allowing other wildflowers to grow.”

Tysoe villagers are part of a broader citizen-led British green volunteering trend that’s been dubbed ‘ungardening’, which urges Britons to let 30 percent of their gardens and public spaces grow wild for the benefit of native wildlife. The trend can present a challenge to British tastes, admits Shirley Cherry, who coordinates a conservation campaign to turn Tysoe into a year-round wildlife-friendly village that’s sprung from the village’s rewilding efforts, Tysoe Wildlife.

“You won’t win everybody over because some people like primness in their gardens,” Cherry says. “Nature likes things messier: curving lines rather than straight lines, plants left to grow.”

On a mild day this May, Tysoe’s verges bloom with daisies, buttercups and wild violets as bees fly in busy arabesques and passersby quizzically stop to read the signs erected to explain the thinking behind the villages’ unkempt verges. Collier, who studies insect counts in her work at Warwick University, says that quantitative analysis of the impact on Tysoe’s insect life is tricky but that she had noticed more bees in the village this year, as well as a greater range of insect species.

Any good news is much needed. A 2019 study found that a third of British wild bees and their pollinating relatives, the hoverflies, are in decline, with habitat loss and climate change thought to be the principal causes of the insects’ demise.

Collier has enjoyed the flowers that have sprung up on her village’s unmown verges, including nectar-rich wildflowers such as oxeye daisy, field scabious and knapweed. She’s also pleased that dandelions, unsung kings of the pollinating world, are being rehabilitated, in Tysoe and beyond.

“People get annoyed with dandelions because they’re so good at dispersing their seeds but they’re amazing pollinators because they’re composite flowers with lots of little flowers in their head,” she says. Collier hopes such efforts will lead to a renewed appreciation of the environmental benefits of wildflower such as dandelions and nettles and the important role they play in supporting insects and animals higher up the food chain.

Author: Sally Howard, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Unsplash, Rosemary Collier and Sylvia Davies

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With its brilliant blue waters, the Adriatic Sea – the body of water separating the Italian peninsula from the Balkans – is a firm favourite with European holiday makers. Its shallow depth and species diversity also provide for a rich commercial fishing ground, with over 1,000 bottom-trawling vessels fishing its seas in a given week, chiefly Italian and Croatian commercial fleets in pursuit of bass, bream and mackerel.

The seafloor nets used by these trawlers are, sadly, a problem for non-commercial species too: dolphins, sharks and the sea turtles that flock to the Adriatic to feed on jellyfish and squid. Fishing trawlers inadvertently capture 6,500 sea turtles a year in the Adriatic, a phenomenon termed ‘bycatch’ or ‘wasted sea life’; over 2,000 of these turtles, it is estimated, will die.

“Bycatch is a very real problem that requires urgent attention and action,” says Lucy Babey, Deputy Director of marine charity ORCA. “Each year hundreds of thousands of turtles, sea mammals, and millions of sharks are incidentally caught and killed in fishing gear around the world.”

Sea turtle mortalities are caused by drowning, as individuals are ensnared and dragged underwater in trawlers’ nets; disorientated turtles find it difficult to change their swimming direction in order to escape through the net’s mouth.

Enter the TED, or Turtle Excluder Device, a structure fitted to the top or bottom of the trawl net that allows larger species to escape. The first TEDs, simple metal grids, were developed in the 1960s in the U.S., where green, leatherback and loggerhead turtles were routinely caught in the nets used by deep-sea shrimp trawlers. European commercial fishing fleets have, however, resisted the wholesale application of TEDs, in the belief the devices exclude larger commercial species, such as cod, as they reduce catch quality due to crushing against the grid. Traditional designs also become clogged with debris, meaning the TED can no longer either catch fish effectively or exclude turtles.

Now a new-generation ‘flexible TED’ is being pioneered in the Adriatic. Mounted on the rearmost part of the trawling net, a tubular potion known as the ‘codend’, the device, designed by marine experts at The Italian National Research Council (CNR), is a tilted escape hatch that acts like a valve, opening when it is hit by a larger weight, such as a turtle or dolphin. Additionally, the net is fitted with an accelerator funnel, to drive the fish down and away from the exit, protecting the quality of the catch.

In a 2019 pilot, CNR’s flexible TED prevented the capture of sea turtles as it affected neither the weight nor composition of the commercial catch and reduced debris capture.

The adoption of the device, says Claudio Vasapollo, a marine biologist involved in the research, “could avoid the bycatch of more than 8,000 sea turtles a year in the Adriatic Sea”. “Although,” he continues, “any solution will need to get the fishing industry on board”.
“It is a matter of urgency that governments invest in, and legislate for, effective bycatch solutions for larger species such as dolphins and turtles,” ORCA’s Lucy Babey adds, of the new-generation TEDs. “These animals play crucial roles within their ecosystem, which are at risk of collapse without them.”

Author: Sally Howard, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Turtle banner image and 3. Zdeněk Macháček & Kris Mikael Krister, 1. David Clode, 2. CNR

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For years, locals in the remote district of Ratnagiri in Maharashtra have supplemented their agrarian livelihoods by poaching the Indian pangolin, a species given the highest protection under India’s Wildlife Protection Act. Through his non-profit Sahyadri Nisarga Mitra, Katdare, locally known as Bhau, had tried everything from organising awareness campaigns to training police to identify poached pangolin parts.

A Ratnagiri local himself, Bhau dropped out of college and has chosen to learn from the field since 1992. He began to wonder, through his immersion in local communities, if creating an emotional connection with the pangolins in the minds of the locals could be the key to finally putting an end to poaching.
“In many ways, conservation is the essence of all religion,” he says.

In 2020, he enlisted the help of the temple priest in the Dugwe village of Ratnagiri. Together they created an event celebrating the scaly mammal – “Khawlotsav” or Pangolin Festival – coinciding with the World Pangolin Day that falls on the third Saturday of February.

Bhau asked toymakers from a nearby town to make a large effigy of the animal, which was then hidden in a deep thicket. When villagers found it, they bedecked it in the finery usually reserved for the village deity and brought it back to the temple with great fanfare. Traditional dances were performed in its honour, and prayers were dedicated to the animals that ate the ants and termites that often infested locals’ crops. Villagers even prayed for better sense and wisdom to prevail upon animal traffickers and poachers. The pangolin replica was then installed in the temple, beside the idol of the village god and finally, it was placed on an elegant scarlet palanquin and paraded from house to house.

In the past, Bhau’s team had made people swear oaths to protect the species and raise awareness not only in their region, but also in neighbouring villages.
“At the end of the festival, they all swore the same oath again, and I could sense a shift,” he recalls.

A few months ago, someone sent him a video of the villagers’ reaction to a pangolin that had strayed into the village. In the past, it would have been killed without a thought. This time, however, when someone suggested they kill it as usual and sell its scales, a village elder reminded them of their oath to protect pangolins.

On a recent visit to the Dugwe village temple, Bhau discovered that the priest – his old ally – had placed a picture of a pangolin permanently next to the deity. The discovery has made him hopeful that their festival might become a tradition.

As he gears up for World Pangolin Day this year, the 60-year-old barefoot conservationist aims to continue fostering lasting connections between men and animals through India’s rich religious and cultural traditions. To advance the cause of sea turtle conservation in a neighbouring district, he plans to organise a drama performance about the ten avatars of Lord Vishnu, who took the form of a turtle in his second incarnation.
“If we get them to think of turtles as incarnations of their favourite god, maybe we’d have a shot at protecting them too,” Bhau says.

Authors: Geetanjali Krishna and Snighdha Bansal, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Sahyadri Nisarga Mitra

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A Visit to Tiger’s Nest

This map of Bhutan is unlike any other. Not only does it give the viewer a sense of the diversity in this tranquil mountain nation, it even references mythical creatures and totems that are of great cultural importance in Bhutan. Chakravarty sees this map as a representation of Bhutan’s biodiversity as well as representative of the Bhutanese lifestyle, including means of livelihood and its traditional architecture and the nation’s endangered fauna. It was commissioned by WWF Bhutan.

Hope and Fear in the Pearl River Delta

One of the most polluted and highly trafficked sea routes in the world is also a stronghold for species such as the Chinese white dolphin, the Romer’s tree frog, the Hong Kong newt, and many invertebrates. Chakravarty drew this map for WWF Hong Kong as a means to generate awareness about the declining wildlife in the Pearl River Delta and the urgent need for the conservation of country parks in Hong Kong. The map emphasises the need for cultural preservation in Hong Kong and the interconnectedness of tradition and ecology, for example in the Tai O Fishing Village and in the forests around the Tian Tan Budhha in Lantau Island.

The Sacred Landscape of Kailash

Stretching across India, Nepal and Tibet, this important pilgrimage destination is home to five religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Bon, Sikhism and Jainism; has a geographically complex terrain: high altitude scrub, montane forest, montane grassland, alpine and evergreen forests etc; and a huge range of flora and fauna. To underscore its importance as a trekking destination, Chakravarty has included famous mountain peaks of the region including Mt. Kailash, Mt. Api and Om Parvat as well as important religious routes and sites in the map. It was commissioned by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD).

Wildlife in the Maximum City

Wildlife in the Maximum City

Flamingos in wetlands, mangroves sheltering the coastline, weird scorpions in the shrubbery and intertidal spaces rich in marine life – Chakravarty’s map of Mumbai, commissioned by international climate network Purpose Climate Lab, showcases its wild side. Look at the map and you’ll realise that even the most crowded hotspots in the city are home to a host of creatures, including Indian Ocean humpback dolphins, porpoises, olive ridley sea turtles and more. “Usually when one thinks of Mumbai, the image of a concrete jungle comes to mind,” says Chakravarty. “Ever since we’ve shared this map on the social media, so many people have reacted with such wonder when they have realised that this busy, bustling metropolis still has such a fabulous array of wildlife!”

Author: Geetanjali Krishna, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves

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