This author has yet to write their bio.Meanwhile lets just say that we are proud aman contributed a whooping 20 entries.
This is with great joy and relief that we can announce that the Forest Department came to treat the young Cesar (≈15 years). The immobilization was an epic story because the lantana thickets were difficult to penetrate. All the personnel was fantastic, assisted by two superb Forest Department elephants (kumkis). The courageous veterinary doctor removed […]
On Wednesday morning (10 June 15), we discovered that a young tusker (we call him Cesar) was limping in the bamboo thickets across the Sigur River. He could not use his left hind leg. We called the Forest Department and fairly rapidly, a team of foresters came to observe the elephant. No photograph could be […]
We have the pleasure to announce the publication of another high profile paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America: “An estimate of the number of tropical tree species.” This paper (see the PNAS website after mid-June 2015) results from an international collaboration of ecologists and was […]
I am writing those lines after talking to an elephant. It is rather rare these days to talk to a wild elephant: or one lives far away from the jungle or one is fearful in such an encounter. Casius is an elephant I don’t know particularly well. He used to come when he was young […]
We live in the jungle, one kilometer away from the village of Valatottam. For each religious festival, call for prayer and formerly sermons from the other village Mavinhalla, we get DAYS and sometime NIGHTS of noise pollution, up to 60 dB. It is as if someone is with you and talks nonsense to you loudly […]
Wild brinjal plants were very much a part of the Cheetal Walk neighborhood. These small prickly shrubs with round green fruits streaked with white, sprouted up after the rains. The tribals cooked and ate the fruits, and we tried them out as well. However, the significance of the wild brinjal (Solanum insanum), which is a […]
The center of the Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve. Last week I went to the next village Masinagudi and ate in a “hotel”. The restaurant is attached to a resort promising to arrange “your next jungle adventure” and it belongs, I believe, to a rich guy. I ate my uninspiring parottas with a cold bacteria-laced vegetable […]
In April 2015 Priya Davidar (Trustee) was at Zürich for the Annual Meeting of the Society for Tropical Ecology (GTOE) to present a paper titled: The Asian elephant (Elephas maximus L.) in southern India: a local success is not a licence to kill. This is a follow up of the two studies by Dr. Raman […]
In these pages, we will tell you what it is to live in the jungle. You may not know why we do this and if you are curious, look at our website. We are ecologists, biologists, to make it short. So what is it so special to live in the jungle? Well, the point is […]
A team of the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) (https://www.ncbs.res.in/) is establishing one-ha plot in the Sigur Nature Trust’s premises to study tree productivity. Tree productivity is an important aspect of the carbon dynamics in the continuum plant-soil-atmosphere. As carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, such studies feed climatic models with useful data. Moreover, […]