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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In spring, the woodland in Blean, Kent, is rich in fresh greenery and soundtracked by trilling birdsong. Soon, this will also be a place where you could glimpse an animal that hasn’t been seen here for 6,000 years. In the distance, you might see a furry brown bison rubbing its vast form against a tree to scratch an itch, or taking a crashing dust bath.

European bison are regarded by conservationists as a ‘keystone’ species, missing from UK landscapes; animals whose natural behaviours are invaluable for woodland ecosystems. Bison help to kill off some trees by eating and rubbing up against their bark, which allows light and new vegetation to come through; and stir up soil by taking ‘baths’. All of this can boost an area’s biodiversity, having a significant positive impact all the way up the food chain. And destroying some trees and plants, bison can even help to kill off some invasive, non-native species. 

“Most English woodland is in a really bad ecological state,” says Evan Bowen-Jones, chief executive of Kent Wildlife Trust, which is behind the reintroduction of bison to Blean in spring 2022. “Everywhere in the UK, biodiversity has been plummeting, and one of our big risks nationally is that our ecosystems are so simplified that we are vulnerable to collapse under climate change,” he explains. “We need to create more ecologically resilient landscapes – and bison are animals that are ‘ecosystem engineers’, that will do the work for us.”

The UK’s leading conservation charity, Kent Wildlife Trust owns almost 2,500 acres of ancient woodland in Blean. Its ‘Wilder Blean’ rewilding initiative will see, initially, a small herd of bison released to roam in 1,000 acres of it, safely fenced off from public footpaths. The landmark £1.2m project will be carefully monitored and if successful, has the potential to be replicated more widely. 

Initially, a herd of just six bison will be released, with the hope that they will breed. The trust has not yet revealed where the animals will come from, but similar projects include one in Zuid Kennemerland National Park in The Netherlands [some members of which are pictured here]. UK animal licensing laws mean that the initial herd can’t exceed ten animals, but when they do, a second herd can be created in another part of the woodland, as well as in partnerships with charities that own more nearby woodland. The areas in which bison are present will be contrasted with those in which they are not, creating a new body of data to demonstrate the transformative impact of bison on English woodlands. This could be leveraged to help persuade lawmakers to lessen the costly legal and financial restrictions on managing bison, which are – arguably illogically – categorised as dangerous wild animals in UK law, and require more safety infrastructure and spending than in other countries. 

For this reason, the Wilder Blean bison project, including multiple layers of specialist fencing and tunnels, has cost more than £1.2m (sourced primarily from a lottery grant).

Kent Wildlife Trust’s plan was inspired by the success of bison reintroduction in The Netherlands, where there is two decades’ worth of evidence to support bison as a conservation tool. “In Europe they are further ahead with this,” says Bowen-Jones. “We need to re-prove everything in the UK context, and we accept that, but the learning from Holland is clear.”

Given that bison would naturally have roamed across a wide variety of landscapes, their reintroduction is an ecological tool that might, in theory, be widely replicated across the UK; Bowen-Jones mentions sand dunes in Cornwall and national parks in the north of the UK as examples. More data from what happens once the bison are ensconced in Blean will help prove what the reality of their presence means for today’s United Kingdom. 

“Their natural behaviours will have all sorts of effects, some of which we know about and some of which we don’t,” says Bowen-Jones. He has seen evidence from The Netherlands that bison themselves are a versatile conservation tool, but he emphasises that the financial and legal  constraints on bison reintroduction limit the application in other contexts.

That said, Bowen-Jones is heartened by the prospect of these great bovines grazing the garden of England. “Bison would have roamed over massive areas; they are a missing component from the vast majority of habitats in this county,” he says. Blean, he hopes, will be key to making the case for bison as a conservation icon for a new era of rewilding.

Author: Sophy Grimshaw, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Banner image and 1. Ray Lewis, 2. Tom Cawdron, 3. Evan Bowen-Jones

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Truffle-fried oysters and oyster soup have long been favorites in Hong Kong’s bustling restaurants.  Oysters have also been grist to the city’s industrial mill: the process of lime-extraction (which dates back to the Tang dynasty) deriving calcium oxide for use in building, boat caulking and agriculture by burning shells or coral skeleton.

Many believe that these myriad appetites of the city which boasts the highest concentration of ultra high-net-worth individuals in the world have caused the rapid decline of its famed oyster reefs which once stretched across an estimated 1,000 km of coastline in the Pearl River Delta area.

A study conducted by University of Hong Kong’s Swire Institute of Marine Science and environmental organisation The Nature Conservancy has shown the enormous potential lost when we lose our native oyster reefs. An individual oyster can, the 2020 study found, filter up to 30 liters of water per hour and 500 liters per day at summer temperatures (the metabolism of oysters, like all marine invertebrates, increases with temperature).

Oyster reefs also provide shelter for crabs and snails, nursery habitats for juvenile fish and feeding grounds for larger fish. They help in denitrification by removing excess nutrients, help seagrass recovery and reduce the resuspension (erosion) of fine sediment, improving water clarity.

Associate Prof. Bayden Russell, Associate Director at The Swire Institute of Marine Science, the University of Hong Kong and involved in the study, explains, “we’re discovering how abundant and widespread these reefs must have been in the region. The level of impact on them has been surprising.” 

The project was a community endeavour, Russell adds. “We deployed a few trial reefs in a couple of places, and that has only been possible because we have been working with the farmers and fishermen.”

The Nature Conservancy has worked on shellfish reef restoration involving local fishing communities in Australia, United States and New Zealand, identifying suitable sites for restoration, creating oyster reef bases and scattering these areas with baby oysters and mussels for the last twenty years, with a typical project costing around US$64,000 for 400m² of reef. The organisation is also helping struggling oyster farmers impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic (and concomitant drops in restaurant oyster consumption) by purchasing five million surplus oysters to be used to seed native shellfish reefs.

Marine Thomas, Conservation Project Manager at The Nature Conservancy, Hong Kong, says when restoring shellfish reefs it is important to understand what is left, how healthy it is and whether the reef is still reproducing in the water. Reef restoration projects such as this are therefore not possible in every context. Oysters, importantly, need something hard to settle on (substrate), even if it is a limestone rock or other oyster shell, to attach to and keep growing. “This then guides us with the kind of restoration method we need to apply,” she says. “In Hong Kong, which has plentiful shellfish larvae, we can undertake restoration wherever we find suitable substrates.” 

A mature reef takes five years to grow; however a trial reef, established under a fish farm in Hong Kong’s Tolo Harbour in 2019, has been colonised by a variety of sea life, including crabs and sea urchins (which are not typically found in the region). In other locations where The Nature Conservancy operates, restored shellfish beds have helped reduce flooding and improve coastal water quality. And that’s good news for our environment, as well as Hong Kongers’ dinner plates.

Author: Bindu Gopal Rao, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: 1. Kyle Obermann, all others The Nature Conservancy

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Once upon a time in India’s Northeast, there was a vast forest through which a river flowed. Until the mid-1980s, its grasslands were home to rare and endangered one-horned rhinoceroses, tigers, elephants and pygmy hogs. However, it became an arena of violent socio-political conflict when the local Bodos began agitating for a separate state. Forest management took a back seat and by 2000, Manas was almost completely stripped of its rich flora and fauna, including all its 100 rhinos. It was at this time that the Wildlife Trust of India (WTI) along with the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) intervened to help these threatened animals. “While there were no rhinos left in Manas National Park, our assessment was that it was still capable of being a healthy habitat for rhinos,” says Vivek Menon, executive director, WTI. In conjunction with the Bodoland Territorial Council and the forest department of Assam, WTI-IFAW created a unique programme in 2002 to revive Manas and its biodiversity, embodied by the one-horned rhino.

“We set up India’s first rescue and rehabilitation centre, Centre for Wildlife Rehabilitation and Conservation (CWRC), near a protected area – in this case, Kaziranga,” says Menon. Here, orphaned rhino calves are hand-reared (some even bottle-fed) for up to three years. “Then we transport them to Manas, allow a one-year period for acclimatisation in controlled but wild conditions and then release them into the jungle,” he says. The presence of the one-horned rhino, the largest herbivore of the grasslands, is a sign that the habitat is in good ecological health. “This augurs well for smaller, lesser-known grassland animals such as pygmy hogs,” he says. For the rhino’s continued survival, its grassland habitat was protected and rewilded.

“Unlike other species that have adapted to diverse habitats, rhinos can only survive in grasslands, that too on very specific grasses,” Menon explains.

In 2011, Manas National Park was removed from the List of World Heritage in Danger and was commended for its efforts in preservation. Last month, the 12th annual camera trapping survey conducted in the forest recorded a three-fold increase in the number of adult tigers – an indicator species for forests rich in biodiversity, in the park. The return of Manas’ wildlife, including rhino conservation efforts, has positive connotations not only for wildlife conservation but also for the communities around the protected areas. For the Bodos, and the Assamese, the Manas turnaround symbolises a resurgence of their ethnic pride, which has taken a battering in the last few decades.

“When we began this project, I never doubted nature’s resilience for a minute,” Menon says. Today, Manas represents hope – hope that it is possible to reverse some of the depredations of poaching, social unrest and climate change on nature; hope that in spite of, and with some help from, humankind, the law of the jungle can prevail once more.

Author: Geetanjali Krishna, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Rhino banner image – Zahir Abbas/ Wikimedia Commons, 1. Gitartha Bordoloi/ Wikimedia Commons, 2. Kaushik Saikia/ Wikimedia Commons, 3. Sashanka for WTI-IFAW, 4. Biswajit Baruah for WTI-IFAW, 5. Julia Cumes for WTI-IFAW
(Wikimedia License – https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode)

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When you find yourself admiring images or footage of rare creatures, do you ever wonder what’s involved in protecting them? Leading the fight against wildlife crime are the world’s wildlife rangers, military-style anti-poaching patrol units for whom conservation is a full-time commitment. In biting cold and searing heat, they cover vast wilderness areas, seizing animal traps and keeping watch for illegal hunting and other suspicious activity. Most of their number – close to 90 per cent – are men. However, as natural communicators and protectors, female rangers tend to punch above their weight.

South Africa’s Black Mambas are a prime example. They’re the not-so-secret weapon of the 62,000-hectare Balule Nature Reserve. As a Big Five reserve situated in an accessible location, Balule has always been vulnerable to poachers. However, the all-woman Black Mambas ranger unit has turned its fortunes around. They patrol the fringes at dawn and dusk, with remarkable success, and run an environmental education programme for local school kids.

“We are the eyes and ears of the bush,” says unit sergeant Nkateko Mzimba. “We don’t carry guns, just pepper spray, because our job is to gather intelligence and act as a deterrent. This leaves the armed rangers free to concentrate on guarding the animals inside the reserve. If we detect an intruder, we call for back-up.”

Prior to the Black Mambas’ formation in 2013, would-be poachers would enter the reserve every day. “We’ve reduced intrusions by 89 per cent,” says Mzimba. The tough circumstances surrounding Covid-19 haven’t dented their record. To date, the pandemic has claimed relatively few lives in rural Africa, but its indirect effects have been catastrophic. With international travellers largely absent from the safari heartlands, there have been fewer safari vehicles at large and fewer tourist dollars coming in, resulting in an upswing in both opportunistic and organised poaching. But Balule has weathered the storm, thanks in no small part to the Mambas.

Mzimba believes that female rangers bring crucial skills to the job. “Women are better at keeping a secret”, she says. “Gathering intelligence is an important part of our work. When men are off duty, relaxing with their friends, they can be tempted to talk too much and say things they shouldn’t. I think women have more self-control.”

It’s a formula that’s beginning to play out in other parts of Africa. In Zimbabwe, the all-female Akashinga unit patrols elephant poaching hotspot Phundundu, while Kenya’s first women’s unit, Team Lioness, covers Amboseli.

The Black Mambas have become powerful role models within their community and have won awards for their efforts towards the Protection of Wildlife, but British campaigner Holly Budge of conservation initiative How Many Elephants feels units like these deserve far greater international support. To this end, she is launching World Female Ranger Day on 23 June 2021. “This new annual event will celebrate these women, while highlighting the significant gender imbalance in environmental conservation”, says Budge. “We’ll be collating gender-specific data about female rangers, to identify their needs.”

As Black Mamba ranger Leitah Mkhabela puts it, “We cannot do it by ourselves. We need more eyes, more people helping us.”

Author: Emma Gregg, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Bull elephant banner image – Jan Fleischmann/ Wikimedia Commons, other images Ian Godfrey Getty images for Lumix, 3DE Studios
(Wikimedia License – https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode)

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In Gangavaram village in the south Indian state of Telangana, G Anjamma alternates layers of cow-dung ash and fresh neem leaves in a basket. In each layer, she places seeds for long-term preservation. Then she seals it with cow dung and clay. “Seeds can be stored for up to three years this way,” she says. As the community seed banker of her village, her house is stacked with big barrels of these seed baskets. This is precious cargo, for all these seeds are indigenous and better suited for rain-fed farming, crucial in a region prone to droughts. Farmers, mostly Dalit, lower caste women from surrounding villages, source seeds from Anjamma. “There is no guarantee how seeds from the market will grow. The market mostly sells commercial crops, and there is little variety,” she says, showing the several regional and national awards she had won for preserving biodiversity and sustainable use of natural resources.

Anjamma is part of a movement led by 5,000 women initiated by the Deccan Development Society (DDS) in 1983. Women farmers gather in ‘sanghams’, groups of varying sizes, to learn sustainable farming. They grow multiple heirloom crops instead of cash crops like peanuts and cotton which need expensive inputs of irrigation, fertilizers and pesticides. “This ensures we don’t have to buy anything from the market to keep our children and ourselves healthy,” says Anjamma. “Our survival also doesn’t depend on prices set by the market,” she adds. It has also ensured that she and other Dalit woman farmers are not at the mercy of government dole-outs, volatile market prices or vagaries wrought by climate change.

Their food and seed sovereignty has also given them resilience to survive the pandemic-induced economic crisis. The sustainable agricultural practices that women like Anjamma promote, allow farmers to practice multi-cropping.

“I grow 25 varieties of food crops in one acre. Even if ten fail, I still have enough to feed my family and sell the excess in the market,” says Mogullama, another Dalit farmer from the region.

The movement has now spread across 75 villages. Office bearers of DDS estimate that at least 5,000 acres in the district are free of chemical inputs. Every January since 2002, the society organizes a month-long biodiversity festival in which a parade of bullock carts showcases the variety of heirloom millets grown in the area.

The DDS model has been replicated in Senegal, Burkina Faso, Togo and elsewhere in Western Africa. “We started collaborating with women farmers in Africa as their geology and climate conditions are similar to those found in our region,” says CN Suresh from the society. DDS is also part of the All India Millet Sisters Network, launched in 2016, which promotes the use of millets amongst women farmers. In 2019, DDS won the Equator Prize for its holistic approach to climate change, food security, and empowering marginalised women and in 2020, the Society won the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation Award: “in recognition of the work of DDS women to rehabilitate degraded lands and promote biodiversity.”

Meanwhile, DDS’ annual festival this year has seen enthusiastic participation. “Even from men!” exclaims I Mollumma, a Dalit woman farmer and the official videographer for the festival. “Perhaps the pandemic has reminded them of the importance of preserving our indigenous biodiversity in farming…”

Author: Karthikeyan Hemalatha, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Karthikeyan Hemalatha

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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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Cheshire Wildlife Trust’s Kevin Feeney was submerged in a chilly watercourse, welly tops breached, when he had a revelation. “I was laboriously trying to build a dam and I thought: surely beavers do a much better job of this? And without the polluting fuel-use and chainsaws, too.”

It’s a big year for a humble semiaquatic rodent. Beavers are native to mainland Britain, but were hunted to extinction in the 18th century by traders seeking their fur, meat and scent glands (which were in demand for perfume-making). The loss of these industrious herbivores – who dam rivers to raise the water level, enabling them fell trees – led to the loss of the mosaic of lakes, meres, mires, tarns and boggy places that were architected by their damming.

Feeney’s project to restore beavers to Hatchmere, a wooded lake area in northwest England, is one of a number of experimental beaver reintroductions due to be carried out across Britain in coming years. They include the release of beaver families and pairs in Dorset, Derbyshire, Hampshire, the Isle of Wight and Nottinghamshire; many of these beavers being sourced from parts of Scotland where residual ancient communities exist, and overpopulation can lead to flooding. At Hatchmere, says Feeney, the ambition was to improve water quality and to clear the shading tree cover that disinhibits diversity.

“In old woodland there’s no sunlight and no moisture on the ground, so you get a lack of plant diversity and a knock-on effect on the number of invertebrates that can thrive,” Feeney says. “When beavers fell trees they let the light back in.”

Beavers’ skills in damming and coppicing are part down to their lowly position on the food chain. “When you’re predated the water is a safer place to be,” Feeney explains. “So beavers need the trees to come to them; and they also need the power of the water to be able to easily shift and trap massive logs.” He adds that the record for the longest beaver-built dam goes to a rodent family in Germany, who built a 168-metre long dam over several generations. Beaver-dammed watermasses also provide homes for otters, water voles and kingfishers.

The downside in beaver reintroductions is overswing: if they dam too efficiently, or in the wrong places, they can flood farmland and roads. Such problems can be overcome, however, with innovations such as the ‘beaver deceiver’, a plastic pipe inserted in a dam that lets water flow through.

Feeney describes the day of the beaver couple’s release into Hatchmere as ‘magical’. “The female jumped out of her cage into a duck pond and started swimming in perfect circles [see footage],” he recalls. “We had to coax the male in, but then he gave a big tail splash and looked right back at our camera.”

The couple also greeted each other with a spot of light paw boxing ‘like kangaroos’, but were found a week later curled around each other on a patch of bramble. Locals have been asked to submit potential names for Hatchmere’s new residents to the Cheshire Wildlife Trust, with a christening due next month.

“There are a lot of puns so far,” says the CWT’s Rachel Bradshaw. “But ‘Justin Beaver’ probably won’t make the grade.”

The Wildlife Trusts have launched a £30 million appeal to kickstart natural recovery across 30 percent of the UK’s land and sea by 2030 wildlifetrusts.org/30-30-30

Author: Sally Howard, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images and Video Credit: Cheshire Wildlife Trust

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How do you track something as shifting and ephemeral as global bird migrations? Use the might of the great British twitcher [bird watcher], that’s how.

BirdTrack is an online citizen science website, operated by the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) in partnership with the RSPB, BirdWatch Ireland, the Scottish Ornithologists’ Club and the Welsh Ornithological Society that allows birdwatchers to record the names and numbers of birds seen in a specified location anywhere in the world.

BirdTrack’s community of 34,000 active users has, to date, uploaded 1.1 billion entries of data, logging everything from species location and behaviour to birdsong and mating behaviours, says the BTO’s Scott Mayson.

“We get simple entries that say ‘I saw X bird at X location’; but then we will get really precise references such as that a male was singing to a female a specific ordnance survey grid reference and it was a mating song. In our world, though, all records are useful.”

The data – which feeds into similar data inputs from the European Commission-funded Eurobird portal – allows the real-time mapping of bird migrations across the European continent and, crucially, charts how these avian flows are changing year-on-year.

“We find that some birds, such as the willow warbler, are migrating further northwards,” Mayson explains, “and that species such as the chiffchaff and blackcap which used to winter on the continent are now wintering here.”

BirdTrack’s vast data pool, Mayson adds, acts as an early warning system that species might be under threat, whether that’s as a result of global heating, pollution or of habitat destruction. “We now know that bitterns, a kind of small heron, are dwindling as their reed-bed habitats [thickly vegetated and waterlogged zones between water and land] have been drained; so there are efforts to restore these habitats that have come directly from this data.”

It’s thanks, too, to BirdTrack data that the RSPB is running mass surveys of species that appear to be under threat, including the lesser-spotted woodpecker and fabled turtle dove.

Andrew Sims, 74 and based in Lincolnshire, has been a twitcher since the 1970s and an enthusiastic BirdTracker for the past eight years. Sims enjoys a daily birding walk along the same looped route from his home and religiously submits his sightings into BirdTrack’s app as he strolls. “By submitting at the same spots every day through the years I know I’m doing my bit to help record population trends,” he says. “It feels like a service as well as a pleasure.”

Little egrets, rare when he began twitching, are now a common sight, Sims says, as his much-loved woodpeckers have slowly disappeared from his patch. He hopes that data such as his will make an argument for government interventions in climate change. “I love that BirdTrack gives you a personal record of your sightings over time as well as the bigger picture,” he adds.

An obvious risk with mass citizen science projects is spotter error: what if an unschooled birder identifies a chaffinch for a sparrow; say? BirdTrack, says Mayson, flags up an entry if a user chooses a species that is unexpected in an area at a given time of year, to make such mis-identifications less likely.

BirdTrack has seen its usership increase 23 percent since the pandemic as we feel a renewed appreciation for outdoor environments, and their feathered residents. BirdTrack has also realised, in this strange time, the potential of its data to protect both avian and human populations from disease. “We can look at the movements of reservoir species such as geese, for example, to predict where the next outbreaks of bird flu might happen,” Mayson adds.

Author: The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) and Eurobird

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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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