Over the 20th century and to this day, several wildlife trusts have taken charge of separate tracts of land to help them recover lost green cover and certain animal species. These trusts and other independent organisations are doing ground-breaking work in helping the UK and other countries maintain their ecological framework, primarily by working to save endangered animals and birds. The following section highlights some of them and the peerless work they do.

Take a look at some of the local efforts to save endangered animals in the UK:

* The PTES (People’s Trust for Endangered Species) works with the vision of protecting and saving endangered animals in the UK and around the world. They do this by working closely with on-ground organisations and locals in affected areas to save endangered animals from extinction. They also fund extensive research in wildlife conservation and provide financial grants for those working in the area of conservation (researchers and experts are often selected for these).
How you can help: Donate to them or volunteer with local organisations that partner with them.

* The Natural History Museum does a large amount of work in the area of awareness and community education to shine a spotlight on endangered animals and birds in the UK. Thus far, it has successfully participated in campaigns to save animals and birds on the brink of extinction, from the Peregrine falcon to the sea otter, and from blue whales to Fisher’s estuarine moths. They also work extensively for flora in the UK.
How you can help: Stay in touch with their programmes on their website and support their team of 300 scientists and their research via donations.

* The Wildlife Conservation Society has offices in several countries, including the UK. The organisation collaborates with local communities in every area of its work to shape their future and take their help in preserving and conserving wildlife. It works for global conservation of endangered plants and animals, proper maintenance of zoos and aquariums, and towards mitigating climate crises and pandemics.
How you can help: You can donate for their work or volunteer in their target areas in your home country. Corporates are also encouraged to tie up for several conservation and awareness programmes.

What you can learn from their efforts

Saving endangered animals in the UK is not the sole responsibility or purview of a few committed organisations and the Government. Indeed, the Government announced a £220 million biodiversity fund to save endangered animals, in 2019. But these efforts can get a considerable boost with the active participation of every individual in the UK.

It’s quite simple to do, too: engage with the local wildlife conservation communities, abstain from purchasing products and services that use illegal animal parts or employ animals for laboratory testing, visit local parks to help wildlife tourism and donate to several related causes. Above all, do spread the word about the issue in your local community at every opportunity, be it by organising seminars or engaging the youth in fun events aimed at animal protection and conservation.

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* Protect the environment to protect wildlife.
Every step you take impacts the world at large, so it’s always better to make every action a positive one. It begins with protecting your immediate environment and adhering to laws and rules about conservation to ensure a litter-free, plastic-free zone in your neighbourhood. The cleaner and greener the environment, the better for the animal and bird kingdom at large. The next step is to be as non-intrusive as possible when visiting natural reserves and national parks – this includes avoiding littering, making noise or interfering with the animals’ way of life. Other steps you can take include saving use of fuel whenever possible, recycling and reducing waste, eliminating plastic usage in everyday life, switching to sustainable cleaners that do not impact marine ecology, and participating in, or organising regular trash clean-ups in your home or office neighbourhood.

* Get information about local conservation and protection efforts.
Your local area or even the city at large has organisations working tirelessly in the arena of wildlife protection and environmental conservation. Most of them require volunteers, donations in cash or kind, and a constant stream of ancillary resources to continue their work. You can get information about local efforts being made to protect animals and birds, and ally with the causes that resonate with you the most.

For example, the Government of the United Arab Emirates has implemented strict measures to protect wildlife in the UAE. Wildlife protection laws in the country extend to the conservation of natural ecologies for the benefit of wildlife such as the red fox, Asiatic caracal, striped hyena, Brandt’s hedgehog, cape hare, sand cat and Arabian leopard, among others. These measures encompass steps such as protecting plant species, preventing dumping in the sea, reducing plastic use, creating nature reserves, and generating environmental awareness among residents. UAE residents are invited to become part of these initiatives and to volunteer resources and time wherever possible.

* Learn more about species in peril.
Every region has some threatened or imperiled species that need help from becoming extinct. Positive human intervention in the form of supporting policies and creation of funds to protect wildlife in the area can go a long way in helping these species. But the first step is to know which species are in peril. You can find out more from your local municipal office, or the nearest national park, or even local organisations in your area that work to protect wildlife and plant ecosystems. Next, you can spread awareness about them, and follow environment-friendly measures to curb further threats.

* Protect your property, but not at the cost of wildlife.
It helps to be kind to all living beings, and avoiding the use of high voltage electric fences, snares and traps to catch animals roaming into one’s property, or impacting crops, is a good measure. Whenever possible, advocate the use of cruelty-free measures to prevent animals from causing agricultural or property damage. Further, do take animals and birds injured in snares to the nearest vet for immediate treatment and to be released back into the wild.

Which other measures can individuals take to protect animals and plants in their area? Tell us in the comments section below.

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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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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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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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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 fish, rivers are high-speed traffic lanes in the same way that motorways are for humans. The Ruhr in west Germany, for example, is such a highway, leading fish to spawning and feeding grounds as well as summer or winter resting places in small lakes and tributaries. On those motorways, however, fish, just like humans, also have to deal with narrow lanes, road works or complete closures. And any such obstacle can have serious consequences for species diversity.

“Fish need unobstructed water ways as they depend on different conditions in different life stages,” says Svenja Storm, a fishing biologist at the regional fishing association of Westphalia/Lippe. “Where an adult fish finds the optimal food for itself, there does not have to be a suitable place for the positioning of spawn or the growth of the young fish. In fact, all fish species migrate in the course of their life in order to optimize their food intake, to avoid unfavourable conditions such as water bodies falling dry to increase the reproductive success.”

One man currently trying to solve this problem is Markus Kühlmann. The 53-year-old engineer has spent the last nine years transforming the 219-kilometre-long Ruhr into the aquatic superhighway it once was. At Baldeney weir near Essen, Kühlmann, together with a team of engineers, biologists, ecologists and hydraulic engineers, developed a system that is unique to the world: a continuously running elevator which transports the fish to the top of the weir.

Part of the impetus for the project, which cost a cool US $8 million, were regulations published by the European Union and the German Environment Agency which require all water bodies in Germany to be in “good condition” again by 2027. Within this regulation was the provision for every German river to be passable for fish.

There being the political will to get Kühlmann’s project off the ground, there was an immediate problem. This location in the Ruhr was not spacious enough for a traditional fish ladder (a series of pools where one is a little higher than the next to allow fish to climb the distance step by step).

Looking for an alternative, Kühlmann found novel fish elevator designs in France, Australia and the United States: “But they did not cover enough height or were created only for certain species,” he says. “We had to come up with something completely new.” He teamed up with engineers from southern Germany as well the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology to first develop a computer simulation.

The way the eventual elevator design works is simple: there’s a tube with a flexible chamber; when the chamber is at the bottom, the fish enter, get transported nine meters upwards and exit the chamber again to continue their journey. To prevent fish from queuing in front of a closed door at the bottom while the lift is at the top, the system consists of two tubes with alternating elevators. Kühlmann and his team developed specific algorithms and underwater sonars to detect when the chamber is full or if a particularly large fish – possibly a predator – is waiting in the elevator and preventing other fish from entering. (The large fish is then transported separately.) “A second software is fed with environmental data that influence the migration activity of the animals, such as season, water temperature or moon phase. That way, the operating intervals of the elevator automatically adjust,” Kühlmann explains.

After years of development, the fish elevator started operating in August 2020 and has been running round the clock since then.

Officials from other cities such as Augsburg are looking to adopt the high-tech elevator model, although Kühlmann admits the price tag of what’s currently a bespoke build will inhibit roll-out of replicas of the Baldeney fish ladder across the globe. That said, Kühlmann hopes his insights will help other regions to think more radically about how they can help migratory fish get from A to B.

Author: Florian Sturm, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Florian Sturm

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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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