Rescue in the New Year
-By Vivek Menon, Executive Director, WTI

A tiger that was captured alive after it 'strayed' into human settlements and created widespread panic around Kishanpur Wildlife Sanctuary near Dudhwa Tiger Reserve in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.

Last year, the New Year began with three elephants, three tigers and a dolphin on the loose. The elephants were in the marginal forests and tea gardens of Assam, the tigers in lantana scrub and sugarcane fields of Uttar Pradesh, and the dolphin in a fast-drying stretch of a river in Orissa. All three, however, shared the same fate as hundreds of displaced animals each year.

On New Year’s Eve I was in a tea garden in Assam. There was loud music blaring and my father, in his mid-seventies and my younger son, who is pushing two, were trying to tango. The rest of the family huddled around a bonfire (I was assured by the management that they used only wood from trees specially planted for the use of the lodge). Tea garden lodges are now a nature getaway destination for the cognoscenti and a green label is desired by most owners.

Elephant calves being bottle-fed at the Centre for Wildlife Rehabilitation and Conservation (CWRC), near Kaziranga National Park, Assam

I was there to escape the madding crowds of New Delhi but also to visit our twin centers of wildlife rehabilitation, for bears in neighbouring Pakke and for the wildlife of Kaziranga in Assam. The latter has, over the years, handled over 50 elephant calves including those that get swept away by floodwaters, those that get displaced from their herd, those that get orphaned by poachers and increasingly, those that get trapped in deep irrigation ditches dug by tea gardens.

There are other cases too and I was thinking of a youngster who had got stuck in a swampy patch three weeks earlier in Kaziranga that my veterinarian and forest guards had pulled out of the mud. The calf was limping and had a large abscess on its hind leg. After treating the animal the lady vet Phulmoni, followed the first thing WTI vets are told to do when we get a calf: tell the guards to look for the natal herd of the calf. Elephant society is formed of closely related and bonded family and if the calf is indeed one of their own, they will take it back. In this case, within a day, the herd was found by the guard at Roumari camp and the elephant went back to the herd.

The elephant calf seen with its natal herd in Kaziranga National Park, a month after it was found alone and reunited by Assam Forest Department assisted by IFAW-WTI

Early in the evening, Ajay Sarma, the energetic head of a local NGO called Nature’s Bonyapran, called to give me bad news. There were two calves, one very young, the other slightly older that were displaced and found by him in two separate locations in the Behali forests of Sonitpur district. We diverted a veterinarian to help him straightaway and I spent the rest of New Year’s Eve in a distracted state, having long conversations with both my vet and Ajay on putting the calf back. “Rub some elephant dung and wet mud on the calf and then see if the herd takes it back,” I instructed, hearing that the first two attempts had failed with the herd moving away and worrying that it was human smell that made the herd reject the calf. “That is the first thing we did,” said Ajay. It was close to midnight. The guards and the boys were tired and close to giving up. “Double the dung and halve the number of people you take along” I persisted, hoping that third time around was lucky. Meanwhile, they had decided the older calf had to be tranquilised and then examined by the vet later.

The Gangetic dolphin stuck in a shallow area in Budhabanga river, Orissa

The music was now louder and those swaying with a glass in hand, near the fire cast unearthly shadows on the long grass. I was alternating between my family and the mobile phone. Two more calls came in quick succession.

“Anjan has been sent to Baripada for rescuing the dolphin” said Ashraf, my head vet from Delhi. Anjan was another of our young veterinary brigade and the dolphin was a Gangetic dolphin that was stuck in a shallow stretch of the Budhabanga River. Strangely, the dolphin was hundreds of miles south of its normal range of the Ganga, the Brahmaputra and its tributaries. Even more strangely, this was an annual occurrence for the last four years and each time the forest department put it into deeper waters, the dolphin found its way back into trouble!

"But is he not needed in Ghazipur?” I asked, for the day before I had been briefed of the mayhem being wreaked in the sugarcane fields of Uttar Pradesh by two tigers who had strayed far from their natural habitat. One had come out of the forests at the tri-junction of Bihar, UP and MP, coming out either from the Palamau Tiger Reserve or the Sanjay NP and moving probably through the Kaimur plateau of Bihar into the Ghazipur area of UP. It had attacked two men on the 30th and killed one and as we were talking, the department was trying to tranquilise the tiger. We had just been approached to send help. “He will do the dolphin first and then go to UP, but meanwhile I am going to the site myself,” assured my senior-most vet. "Will you tackle Ghazipur or Faizabad first?” I asked referring  to the second tiger that had walked more than a hundred kilometres, perhaps more, from its natal area in the Pilibhit forests.

For the past two months, the tiger had followed the Gomati River downstream, crossing fields and cultivation and in the process attracting large crowds that burst crackers and took pot shots at it. It killed two people and injured a few along its process, seemingly on course for the state capital Lucknow! Was it a young adult male displaced by a bigger male in Pilibhit, trying to find a forest patch for itself which did not exist? Was it just a more curious and intrepid wanderer than the usual feline, staking territory unknown to its kith and kin for many decades? Was it on a political mission, to meet the powers that be in Lucknow in order to brief them of the critical state tigers had been reduced to in India? “Will do both,” said Ashraf with the equanimity that only a veterinarian-biologist who specialises in wildlife rehabilitation and Thirukkural can manage. Neither of us were to know that while we were talking, a third tiger would stray outside Pilibhit and kill a child only a day later, but with two tigers, three elephants and a dolphin our hands were full already.

“Happy New Yea—a-a-r toooo you” sang the crowd as the clock struck twelve. “The calf has gone back…back to its herd..!” yelled an exited Ajay Sarma as third time was temporarily lucky for the Behali calf. “Three teams, two biologists and a vet in each team is what we need,” said Ashraf above the din.

What we needed was much more. We needed the New Year to bring in political and bureaucratic will necessary for saving forests in the first place. The integrity of existing protected areas needed to be strengthened. You cannot let encroachers take away half the forests meant for wildlife and then be surprised if the animals made human-dominated landscapes their own. We needed corridors to link the small, isolated sylvan patches that we refer to as national parks and sanctuaries and that are our natural safety net. We have taken over 95% of India’s land for our own selves. We need to keep the remaining 5% inviolate as a habitat for all the other hundreds of thousands of species that are our fellow country mates. That is what is needed. Till then our teams help the forest department cope with these displacements on a daily basis wherever we can reach. Apply Band Aids on the bleeding body of Mother Nature. And hope…that the New Year is a Happier New Year than the one that has gone by. 

Photos: Dr Anjan Talukdar (top and 2nd from top), Dr Phulmoni Gogoi (3rd), Bhagat Singh / WTI

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