Since his passing around a week ago, conservationist A.J.T. Johnsingh’s vision for a comprehensive landscape-wide conservation plan for the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve has come to the fore. Conservationists have since been urging the government to implement more of Johnsingh’s recommendations to ensure better contiguity between habitats for elephants, tigers, and other large mammals, especially between what constitutes the present-day Mukurthi National Park and the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve (MTR).
Besides his astute observations on the need to protect the Mukurthi-Mudumalai corridor for the movement of wildlife in the region, he advocated a landscape-wide conservation model that covered human-animal interface areas in the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve.
Mammal corridors
A 2010 article authored by Johnsingh, R. Raghunath, and Tarsh Thekaekara for the nature and wildlife conservation magazine, Sanctuary Asia, illustrates the importance of one of the “most important yet unrecognised large mammal corridors in the Nilgiri landscape” between the Mukurthi National Park and the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve (then known as the Mudumalai Wildlife Sanctuary) that includes the Naduvattam, Gudalur, Singara, and O’Valley forest ranges.
“The best route for a large mammal, such as a tiger, to reach the Mudumalai Wildlife Sanctuary from the Mannarkad Forest Division-Silent Valley National Park [in Kerala] is to reach Mukurthy via Silent Valley and then descend to Mudumalai,” they wrote in the article, titled ‘The Mukurthy-Mudumalai Large Mammal Corridor’.
Rapid surveys done at the time revealed that large mammals, including elephants, used two routes. The first went past the Mukurthi and Pykara reservoirs through Pandiar in Naduvattam into Glenmorgan and down the Singara Range into Mudumalai. The other route was through O’Valley, then Gudalur, and entering Singara through Deivamalai and Wilson Plantations.
In a 2010 paper, ‘Ensuring the future of the tiger and other large mammals in the southern portion of the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve, southern India’, published in the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society, Johnsingh, who co-authored it with R. Raghunath, Rajeev Pillai, and M.D. Madhusudan, advocated the expansion of the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve to parts of Naduvattam, Sigur, Singara, and the Nilgiris Eastern Slopes to ensure the contiguity of the habitats for the wildlife between Mukurthi and Mudumalai.
Nilgai in Sathyamangalam
The authors also noted that there were historical records of the presence of Nilgai as well as Chinkara (Indian gazelle) in Sathyamangalam, which is easily accessible to wildlife populations through Mudumalai, and suggested that their reintroduction to the landscape would provide tigers inhabiting the region with a prey base comprising “four species of peninsular antelopes, three species of forest deer, a species each of wild cattle, wild pig and mountain ungulate, and four primate species”. Speaking to The Hindu, Tarsh Thekaekara, a member of the State Board for Wildlife and conservationist who collaborated with Johnsingh in studying the importance of the Mukurthi-Mudumalai wildlife corridor, said some of the conservationist’s recommendations, such as including parts of the Nilgiris Eastern Slopes, Singara, and Sigur into the protected area matrix of the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve had been implemented by the State government.
Mr. Thekaekara added that Johnsingh’s vision for conservation of the wildlife habitats in the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve was on a landscape level, with a need for conservation zones, co-existence zones, and exclusion zones to ensure a framework for humans and wildlife to co-exist alongside each other.
‘Return of tigers’
“Already, we are witnessing tigers repopulating many areas where they were not seen even 15 years ago. Understanding these corridors and keeping them free of major development impediments, coupled with better management through the use of tools such as eco-development committees, could provide a way forward for better conservation and management practices in the future throughout the landscape,” said Mr. Thekaekara. Johnsingh, in the 2010 paper, also advocated protection of the forests of the Siruvani hills to the southeast of the Mukurthi National Park and to the east of the Silent Valley National Park, which are important for biodiversity, as well as for the catchments of the Siruvani reservoir. “Securing these wildlife habitats for conservation would ensure connectivity not only in a west-east direction between the Silent Valley National Park and the forests of the Coimbatore Forest Division but also to the extensive forest areas to the north of the Nilgiri Plateau,” the paper said.
Critical links threatened
Wildlife areas in the southern parts of the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve are linked to the forests to the north (the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve) in terms of continuous forest cover; yet, a few critical links are extremely narrow and continue to be highly threatened by anthropogenic factors, the authors concluded. They added that expanding the protection in the region to important wildlife corridors would ensure the survival and dispersal of key wildlife species in the region.
As tributes pour in for the late conservationist, naturalists hope the government would help to perpetuate his memory by implementing his recommendations for a sustainable Nilgiris.
