If you travelled the world in search of this handsome wild monkey, you would be forced to come right back to the evergreen forests of south-west India’s Western Ghats to breathe the air it breathes. In fact, thousands of tourists do just that… come to special places in India to see how beautiful our planet must once have been.

In truth, India is many nations rolled into one. The great Himalaya, the sub-Himalayan terai, central and peninsula forests, living coasts, magical coral islands, and even our cold and hot deserts… India has sights and experiences to offer that few other nations can match.

Apart from the tiger, arguably the most-loved animal on the planet, this lion-tailed macaque Macaca silenus, is one among thousands in India that can hold us in thrall. It thrives on fruits, but will readily take a bird, small squirrel, lizard, snail, spider or beetle! Its progenitors probably emerged soon after the dinosaurs threw in the towel when the first primate-like mammals made their appearance. This old-world monkey’s ancestry is, however, more recent, some three million years or so. That’s long, long before Homo sapiens dreamed up the false notion that they knew how to manage the planet better than Mother Nature!

Even more impressive than the way it looks (all purpose, no vanity) is what this primate managed to do with a little help from the likes of Prof. M. K. Prasad and Dr. Sálim Ali and a phalanx of scientists, poets, journalists, teachers and students. This motley group, prevailed upon India’s late Prime Minister Mrs Indira Gandhi to stop the construction of a dam that would have drowned Silent Valley, one of the world’s most biodiverse jungles.

Some suggest this was the birth of modern-day, science-based environmental battles. Long before people began talking seriously about saving other species in the name of the tiger, this monkey managed to save a retinue of life forms, including tigers, leopards, elephants, sloth bears, wild dogs, flying squirrels, pangolins, birds, insects, fish and a gazillion plants, too numerous to list… many found nowhere else on Earth.

Clearly, India’s nature tourism potential is an under-utilised, under-appreciated asset. But our current implementation strategies need vast improvement if we wish to achieve the multiple objectives of biodiversity conservation, livelihood creation and brand-equity enhancement. We can do all this, without eroding our natural capital, provided we exhibit the same silent strength that has stood this macaque in good stead for millions of years and adapt to nature instead of trying to force our unproven survival strategies on our fragile biosphere.

First published in Sanctuary Asia, Vol. XXXVIII No. 10, October 2018

The post Silent strength appeared first on The Teenager Today.

First a disclosure… I adore frogs. All frogs, not just this exquisite Western Ghats Rhacophorus photographed by Sunil Sachi in a Chikmagalur coffee plantation.

But my love for frogs is not the primary reason I believe that Amphibia are key to our efforts to survive the worst impacts of climate change. Of course it’s complicated, but here is how I explain it to kids — my primary constituency.

Frogs are amazing creatures. They have lived on Earth for around 250 million years. Most live three lives in one, first as an egg, which turns into a tadpole, which then turns into a frog. These amphibians have thin skins and can absorb water and oxygen from their surroundings. If the skin dries, the frog dies.

Though frogs are survivors, they are having a tough time surviving human beings who dump poisons in their water and pump too much carbon into the atmosphere. This ends up drying their moist habitats and also exposes them to deadly diseases.

Scientists say that like frogs, humans too will soon face water and disease problems because of climate change. The best way to keep frogs from dying, suggest herpetologists (scientists who study frogs), is to protect their water sources including wetlands, rivers, lakes and ponds. This will benefit us too, because these habitats store carbon, reduce flooding and supply us with water during droughts. Just this one act of keeping parts of our planet natural will help humans to overcome some of the worst impacts of climate change.

There is much more. Like living, breathing alarm calls, frogs are sending us early warnings of problems, giving us time to defend ourselves before it is too late. Frogs are also nature’s pest-controllers, capable of consuming their own body weight in mosquitoes every day. From the secretions on frogs’ skins scientists extract an array of life-saving medicines that protect humans from deadly microbes. Beyond this, most kids hardly need convincing and nor should adults. As the first vertebrates to colonise land, amphibians were the first to hear airborne sounds through evolved tympanums. Hopefully, we will not be the ones to force them to let out their last and final call.

First published in Sanctuary Asia, Vol. XXXVIII No. 8, August 2018.

The post Last and final call appeared first on The Teenager Today.

Time loses all meaning when I am in wild places, urban or rural. That chippy sound I’m hearing right now outside our ground-floor Mumbai home? It’s a Purple Sunbird, Nectarinia asiatica, doing what it does best… stealing nectar from flowers.

I often spend time watching orioles, sunbirds, flycatchers, Magpie Robins, parakeets, koels, bulbuls, pigeons, sparrows… and a veritable mob of peafowl from the next-door Parsi Panchayat campus that comes to raid our tiny kitchen garden. In the small wilderness that our building protects, I sleep to an orchestra of amphibians and wake to birdsong. At dawn and dusk, all manner of eat-or-be-eaten hunger games play out between spiders, ants, beetles, termites, centipedes, geckos, snakes, pipistrelles and a particularly shy and exquisite-looking pair of shrews.

“It is vital that such natural urban hideaways be protected,” said herpetologist Dr Sathyabhama Das Biju when visiting us one monsoon evening, adding with conviction that he fully expects a species or two new to science to be discovered in some or other ignored urban wildernesses.

Returning to our sunbird… its curved beak is fashioned to perfectly fit nectar-rich flowers like the flame of the forest Butea monosperma. If perchance the beak and flower are not a perfect fit, the bird will do what any survivor would… steal! It punches a tiny hole at the base of a flower and collects its reward without returning the pollination-service nature had intended.

Of course, when hunger strikes, nothing is off the menu for any opportunistic survivor… including the flies we see in this protein-rich Diptera swarm.

First appeared in: Sanctuary Asia, Vol. XXXVIII No. 6, June 2018

The post Hunger games appeared first on The Teenager Today.

How stunning is this? One of Mumbai’s inveterate naturalists, Yogesh Chavan, found 42 (count them!) exquisitely arranged salmon Arab butterfly caterpillars on a single meswak leaf at the Bhandup Pumping Station next to Mumbai’s Sanjay Gandhi National Park.

The collective caterpillar display has everything to do with survival. Function is central to the body design and behaviour of all living creatures. Butterflies almost invariably lay their eggs on specific ‘host plants’ so the larvae that emerge from the eggs are able to fulfil their singular purpose in life… to eat!

The first meal tends to be the eggshell… then the leaf on which the egg was carefully laid. Caterpillars could consume 25,000 times their original body weight, moulting several times before metamorphosing into the next stage of their life cycle. I have edited Sanctuary for 38 years now, but am still frustrated by how little I know. Did you know that caterpillars possess as many as 4,000 muscles? You have just 629 and they have 248 muscles in their head capsules alone!

Though they can’t see very well at all, they actually have six times as many eyes as you do. And no, they do not have a large number of legs. They are insects and have just six. Their other appendages that look like legs are ‘prolegs’ that help them hold on to plants for dear life! When they turn into butterflies, all but the six legs attached to their thoracic segments will drop off.

With no weapons to defend themselves, these soft-bodied creatures pack an impressive arsenal to ward off predators. Some steal poisons from host plants to deter birds and other insects and, you better believe it, some adjust their blood pressure to assist in locomotion.

How does all this magic happen? Your guess is as good as mine. But this I know… Dr. Richard Dawkins got it right when he said: “The truth is more magical — in the best and most exciting sense of the word — than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle. Science has its own magic: the magic of reality.”

The next time you visit a distant wilderness, remember the wild exists right next to you, in your home, in your gardens… even in your gut!

As singer Louis Armstrong exclaimed… long before Dawkins: “What a wonderful world!”

First appeared in: Sanctuary Asia, Vol. XXXVIII No. 4, April 2018.

The post What a wonderful world! appeared first on The Teenager Today.

The fingers clutching this tree branch in Valparai look startlingly familiar. Hold your own hand out. Now compare the shape, the nails, the joints… all fashioned by the same designer that gifted us our own grasping tools — nails and all.

The hand on this page belongs to a lion-tailed macaque Macaca silenus, found nowhere else but India’s Western Ghats. Handsome beyond description, this monkey from Valparai has much more going for it than mere good looks.

Way back in the 1970s, before ordinary people were even aware of the looming threat of climate change, all-time greats such as Sathish Chandran Nair, Dr Sálim Ali, M. K. Prasad, Romulus Whitaker, M. Krishnan, Sugatha Kumari and a host of others were (unwittingly) working to solve today’s climate crisis. Their partner-in-arms was this Old World primate that became the symbol of a powerful national resistance movement against destructive large dams. In the process, Silent Valley, one of the world’s most precious moist evergreen forests was saved from death by drowning.

Then, as now, the primate on this page obeys an instruction that clever human primates still cannot wrap their heads around… that it’s far more sensible to adapt to nature than try and coerce it to obey human diktats.

So there we have it. An uncomplicated lesson from a less clever, but better-adapted primate who actually accepts without debate the wisdom Shakespeare delivered through Julius Ceasar: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

First appeared in Sanctuary Asia, Vol. XXXVII No. 12, December 2017

The post In our hands appeared first on The Teenager Today.

Part of the Sanctuary family since 2013, and the face of the Leave Me Alone campaign, actor Dia Mirza is evolving into a key public opinion mover and champion for India’s wilds. BITTU SAHGAL speaks with her on what moves her and why.

“Leave Me Alone!” It’s a tough line you hooked on to.
It just made so much sense to me! I can almost hear wild nature saying this. It’s a line that feels so personal. It’s evocative. And the rationale — that nature will heal all the damage done, if only we permit her to — is indisputable. All Nature asks of us is that we let her BE. Tigers and a host of other species, the gardeners of our Eden as you call them, ask from us just space, isolation and protection. In return they offer us and our children safety, security and health in perpetuity.

You grew up in Khairatabad, Hyderabad, a city of wildernesses and rock formations. Is that where your love of wild nature was born?
My early years were spent in Jubilee Hills at a time when the area had very few homes and a lot of wild open spaces, rocks, green cover and streams. Later, I moved to a home that had a front yard, courtyard and backyard. My mother spent hours tending to her gardens. The backyard had many large fruit-bearing trees that attracted many birds, butterflies and bees.

Your mother was a major influence in your life?
Absolutely! My mother talked to all her plants. Each one was her child. I will never forget the two cobras that lived under a massive rock in our garden. I must have been about three, cradled in my mother’s arms, and when I saw them go by, I squealed, “Mamma look!” And Mom just smiled and said, “Let them be. They won’t harm you. Just be still until they go.” And they silently went their way. I was taught not to fear snakes, or spiders or other ‘creepy-crawlies’ that most parents orient their children to hate. We often dressed the wounds of injured birds that our gentle dog would bring to us and set them free when they had healed. Those lessons in living came early. One of my father’s carpenters once brought us a baby python of all things and I remember taking care of it until it grew long enough to be set free on an early morning nature trail in the wilderness behind our home.

Dia Mirza is India’s UN Environment Goodwill Ambassador

Actor and environmentalist Dia Mirza has been chosen as United Nations (UN) Environment Goodwill Ambassador for India. She will work towards spreading the message on issues related to the importance of clean air and water, wildlife and ocean conservation and climate change.

“Environmental issues will be the defining challenge of this era, and I am committed to helping the UN as a Goodwill Ambassador to do everything I can to provide a better future. Together, we will continue working towards conservation of nature, tackling climate change and inspiring people to live more sustainably,” she said.

Dia has been working relentlessly as a spokesperson for wildlife and environment, having been closely involved with the Sanctuary Nature Foundation as a member of its Board of Directors.

She has also served as the ambassador for Wildlife Trust of India (WTI). She took her commitment to championing causes connected with nature to the next level, when she made her directorial debut by directing a Public Service Film on the occasion of Global Tiger Day 2016.

“Young India can and will turn climate adversity to advantage. I believe this with all my heart. And I will leave no stone unturned,” she says.

Clearly your parents gifted you this transparent affinity for nature?
Indeed. My father was a creative man. He drove cross-continent from Germany to India, stopping along the route to paint and photograph wild terrains. He would come to our school to speak to us kids, and once asked us to exercise our imagination and paint a wall in school. What emerged was an elephant hatching from an egg! He would use nature to help push the boundaries of our imagination. Our library wall was embellished with a rainforest painting done by the seniors. My father passed away when I was just nine but I felt his presence in school long after, because those painted walls were still there. Both my parents loved nature, they were ahead of their time, worried about forest loss, climate change and more. They created compost heaps and taught me about waste management when I was seven or so. They never used plastic. Buckets, mugs and water bottles were all metal or glass. My stepfather was also a man who loved nature and sport. We would always run outdoors and dance in the first rain! He and my mother played a huge role in exposing me to the wonders of nature.

I know Dia Mirza is real. But do you struggle to be accepted as a wildlife activist?
No! If I was seeking some kind of ratification or acceptance from others I might have had to struggle, but I am in love with the wild… plain and simple. I care deeply about nature and wish to enjoin my mission with that of others who too want to make a difference! Celebrating wild heroes, bringing their message to the larger public and fighting to protect the tiger is a blessing, not a ‘struggle’. That said, I wish more people understood the rationale that is grasped so easily by your million-strong Kids for Tigers vanar sena… the tiger-ecosystems-biodiversity-water-climate reality that seems to elude most adults.

As I said, you are real. You even got slammed by the ‘empire’ for your position on the destructiveness of large dams. Would you do that again?
In a heartbeat. Being more experienced now, I would probably handle such responses better. For instance, I really don’t take criticism or opposition to my views personally. Nor do I tend to judge other individuals. Instead, I find addressing issues of policy and questioning ‘the system’ more effective, comfortable and rewarding. As for public opinion, I learned long ago that getting attention using emotion is all very fine, but that must be quickly followed up with a flow of rational communications, debate and interactions.

Your advice to young adults looking to make a difference in the way you have.
Rise up. Because you can. No matter what your circumstance, you are in control and can make choices. Tread gently upon this earth. Be aware of your own impact on the planet. Try to consume less. Don’t allow material things to define your standing and your beauty. Beauty is what beauty does. Listen to your heart. Work hard. Don’t underestimate yourself or the mission ahead of you. Don’t take yourself too seriously for that can be a burden. And remember the Dalai Lama’s advice: “It is your duty to enjoy every day of your life.”

First published in: Sanctuary Asia, Vol. XXXVI No. 8, August 2016.

The post Meet Dia Mirza — Actor, Activist, Nature Worshipper appeared first on The Teenager Today.

As mysterious as they are beautiful, the six flamingo species known to man have fascinated artists and scientists in equal measure down the ages. The Egyptians believed they were living representatives of the sacred god Ra, while the Romans relished their fleshy tongues, evolved to pump water out of well-fashioned bills while retaining filtered foods.

Living fossils, evidence positively dates flamingos to the late Eocene-Early Oligocene (35 to 30 million years ago) and recently, in north-eastern Spain’s Ebro Basin, researchers were astounded to find an 18-million-year-old fossilised flamingo nest (quite unlike the mud-nests that they build today!) with five eggs in it.

The exquisite-looking birds are truly primordial and truly confusing. Some scientists suggest they are related to ibises and spoonbills. Others claim they are closer to avocets and stilts. But, surprisingly, new molecular evidence seems to point towards grebes as their closest relatives.

Watching flamingos in the wetlands of Keoladeo Ghana, Bharatpur in the late 1970s with Dr Sálim Ali, I got one of my finest lessons in humility. I asked him whether the filter-feeding mechanism of flamingos and whales represented an example of convergent evolution. A full minute later, just as I was beginning to imagine he had not heard me, he turned to me and said: “You could probably say that. But it is best that you find out more when you get back to the Society in Bombay. Somehow the more I learn, the less, I discover, I know.” This from a man who brought the magic and the fragility of ‘Flamingo City’ to public notice and lobbied to protect these miraculous birds from all manner of developmental threats.

Rich and powerful Romans killed countless flamingos because they relished their fleshy tongues. But poets in Rome were in awe of flamingos, and named them after the Latin for flame… flamma. Today, rich and powerful industrialists, more powerful than the Romans of yore, have declared a virtual war on wetlands, without which flamingos cannot survive. And those carrying the conservation baton that Dr Sálim Ali handed down, are raising flags of resistance, enlisting the young in a life or death mission to keep the old flames alive.

First appeared in Sanctuary Asia, Vol. XXXIII, No. 1, February 2013

The post Keeping old flames alive appeared first on The Teenager Today.

Tiger mothers can be as gentle when handling their tiny cubs, as they can be fierce in their defence. This tigress, and all other cats for that matter, evolved from a tiny squirrel-sized mammal that chased down and ate insects in the mists of pre-history! After weathering incredible trials of life, tigers moved south some 12 million years ago from Siberia or China, when the geologic forces that fashioned the Himalaya created a land bridge across the Tethys Sea connecting ancient Laurasia to the Indian subcontinent, when it drifted away from Gondwanaland. And fossil evidence gathered from Kurnool suggests that they probably colonised the Indian subcontinent as recently as 10,000 years ago.

Be that as it may, Panthera tigris is today at the very apex of its evolutionary pinnacle. Honed as a fine weapon of survival through natural selection, it has virtually no enemies save for man. Maya and her cub seen here, were first spotted on June 16, 2014, at the Tadoba Tiger Reserve’s Panchadhara tank area. They exemplify the species’ survival skills, without which they would have been hard put to endure the shenanigans of Homo sapiens – the ultimate neighbours from hell.

Let’s put it like this. For the tiger, ‘business-as-usual’ without the lethal touch of Homo sapiens, would have been a cakewalk. But with our boorish behaviour against every lifeform on earth (including our own), tigers and a host of other creatures will perish if subjected to ‘business-as-usual’ of the human kind.

Consider this. Maya had two very beautiful little cubs. Both died two weeks ago after this image was shot. Not at the hands of poachers, but in the jaws of the Katezhari male tiger who killed them because that is the way of tiger society. Their ‘business-as-usual’ model. Mortality at the hands of a male tiger Maya’s kind can cope with. She is now actually mating with the very male that killed her cubs. It’s the other ‘business-as-usual’ model that could be her undoing. Mining, dams, poaching, railway lines and highways through her forests? And agriculture that now out-performs industry in the deforestation race? That Maya’s evolutionary survival skill-set never quite prepared her for.

First appeared in Sanctuary Asia, Vol. XXXIV No. 4, August 2014

The post On ‘Business-As-Usual’, naturally appeared first on The Teenager Today.

This herd of Kaziranga elephants loves the rain. Their thick skins serve as protection from the cold. In summer, skin-wrinkles retain water to cool them down gradually. Evolution has gifted these pachyderms an entire bag of tricks to stave off heat, including large ears that double up as radiators, a long trunk that serves both as a personal shower, and a straw to swoosh drinking water into their mouths. They also wallow in wet mud, which functions as sunscreen to keep their skin moisturised, preventing sunburn.

Despite all this, elephants have a huge problem dealing with over-heating and have begun suffering the ill-effects of rising temperatures on account of climate change. Given their sheer size, elephants lose a lot of water with every exhaled breath and must therefore consume around 150 litres of water each day. Since they cannot sweat to cool themselves, when temperatures are higher than their body temperatures, even ear-flapping is pointless. Interestingly, elephant hides absorb water more easily than most other animals’ skins. Predictably, some of their happiest summer days are spent in and around favoured pools. This is why matriarchs keep a mental map of available water sources, including those hidden below river beds that must be dug up!

In 1982, the late M. Krishnan wrote in Sanctuary Asia: “Though excellent swimmers, the soft, miry approaches to the water have inhibited them from moving out along their old trek routes, now submerged by the water spread beneath the dam, for elephants being so heavy, have an instinctive dread of getting bogged. Their reaction to this imposed limitation on their free movement is to turn somewhat wasteful in their feeding and aggressive towards humans — the usual reaction of elephants confined to a location full of men.”

I cringe at the thought of confining wild elephants! And no, it’s not just an ‘animal rights’ issue. Consider the fact that India’s North East is being obliterated under dam reservoirs, canals, roads, mines and even a massive wall to enable VIP guests of the Numaligarh Refinery near Kaziranga to play golf! Such confinement is a prescription for human-elephant conflict, turning elephant worshippers into elephant haters. But if we leave no space for elephants to live, nature will leave us no way to survive either.

And that’s the plain truth.

The post The plain truth appeared first on The Teenager Today.

An Irrawady dolphin vanishes into the food-rich, mud-brown waters of the Sundarbans Tiger Reserve and a whole world of opportunity, hidden from human eyes, opens up a micro-moment later. Using sophisticated sonography, the aquatic mammal sweeps its head expertly left to right to stitch together an image of its underwater larder, principally shoals of fish.

The number of these rare dolphins was once presumed to hover around 500 in the Sundarbans. Recently a massive, hitherto unknown, population of 6,000 dolphins was discovered in Bangladesh! Who knows what other secrets lie hidden in this mangrove Horn of Cornucopia, which has nurtured life forms, large and small, for countless eons.

One way or the other, over 30 million humans living in Bangladesh and West Bengal’s 24 Parganas South are dependent on the same larder. But, unlike dolphins, sharks, crocodiles, turtles and tigers, humans seem determined to damage, exhaust or otherwise extinguish this food source. It is this ability to lay waste to nature’s once inexhaustible resources that differentiates us from every other living creature on planet Earth… not our remarkable ability to compute or abstract or articulate using poetry, science or art.

We know, of course, that the dolphin’s fluke serves the very vital function of propelling these marine mammals forward (they all once lived on land and then returned to the sea!). No one yet knows however, what function humans perform per se? We will probably go to our graves wondering what fluke of nature gifted Homo sapiens the power of life and death over the rest of nature… a power we are exercising in the most irresponsible way possible.

First appeared in Sanctuary Asia, Vol. XXXV No. 12, April 2016.

The post A fluke of nature appeared first on The Teenager Today.