Entries by aman

How the Todas’ sacred grass was ‘rediscovered’

The Todas are a tiny tribal group living in the Nilgiri mountains in the Western Ghats of India. Traditionally, they relied on a special breed called Toda buffalo, who provided them with milk and butter. The preferred habitat of the buffalo is wetlands, originally abundant on the Nilgiri Plateau. The Todas derived their construction material […]

Expert vs. calculated corridors

E.R.C. Davidar, the founder of the Sigur Nature Trust, undertook a study in the late 1970’s with the support of the Bombay Natural History Society on the elephant corridors of the Nilgiri (Davidar, 1981; see Davidar et al. 2012). He adopted an interesting approach: he assumed that elephants had circled the Nilgiri Mountains before the […]