The Arbornaut, page 27
6:30 a.m. Still shivering in darkness, our team of four Indians and one American jump into an open-air jeep. Along the track, women are already awake and hauling water in plastic jugs from the village well to their thatched huts. Wood-burning cookstoves emit small spirals of fragrant smoke into the sky, announcing breakfast. As a result of the cook fires, black soot insidiously enters the air, creating health issues for women who stir the pots and inhale particulates, and that same aerial dust accelerates ice melt in Himalayan glaciers several hundred miles away by darkened ice surfaces melting faster.
6:50 a.m. Our noisy vehicle passes under a mango canopy where two guards peer down from a rickety treehouse. In their aerie, watchmen guard the village crops from marauding tigers and elephants.
7:00 a.m. At the park gate, armed rangers inspect our paperwork. Entry permits are issued in limited numbers. Despite best efforts, poaching is rampant in India and threatens big cats with extinction.
7:00–10:00 a.m. Still shivering, we bump along a rough track in our open-air vehicle with all five senses on overdrive. Our guide listens for a specific bird call that signals danger, providing a clue to the location of a predator (most likely: big cat).
8:13 a.m. The driver screeches to a halt, whispering, “Listen.” A female Sambar deer shrieks nearby. In the branches above our dirt track sprawls a leopard, chewing its fresh kill of a fawn. The laws of the jungle are tough, and one hesitant step by a mother and her offspring resulted in a casualty. This dominant predator retreated to the treetops to consume breakfast. We all marveled at the notion of a ground-based predator using the canopy as a safe haven, making our whole-forest approach to tree ecology all the more relevant. Leopards, like tigers, are rapidly declining throughout India, and both need healthy forests to survive.
9:15 a.m. After seeing two more leopards but, alas, no tigers, we exit from the forest and prepare for reentry into the urban landscape. Due to its permit restrictions, the park would not allow us to get out of our four-wheel-drive vehicle, so we were limited to observations, photographs, and note-taking as our means of “studying” forest canopies in India’s tiger reserves. This visit was more like a quick ground-truthing exercise, not a full-blown research program, which might entail several years of similar observation days. But again, as Soubadra, T Ganesh, and I ramp up our international collaborations, it is important for us to share sights and sounds of forest ecosystems, giving rise to conversations that lead to new ideas. The entire drive was full of animated discussion. To travel home after this quick visit, I will make a huge transition from a remote wildlife reserve through four airports and several dense cities, ultimately disembarking in Florida. No time for a shower, I pack in two minutes and quickly gulp a few mouthfuls of traditional vegetarian fare.
10:10 a.m. On the road, I am bound for the local airport as the first leg of a long journey. Indians think nothing of a six-hour taxi drive, dodging goatherds, oxcarts, children walking to school, bicycles groaning under enormous loads, roaming cows, and dilapidated public buses. I ration my single water bottle, as any explorer always does. My mind struggles with the abrupt transition from oxcarts to jumbo jets over a half-day time frame.
4:45 p.m. The domestic flight from Bangalore to Mumbai is delayed. I frantically stand in a long line to find another flight. Luggage is nowhere to be seen.
8:30 p.m. Late arrival to Mumbai’s domestic airport leaves a meager two hours to connect at the international terminal approximately twelve miles away. Miraculously, my suitcase appears on the belt. The wait for a taxi is over an hour. Against better judgment, I squeeze aboard the interterminal bus at 9:15; I have just over one hour before the New York flight departs.
9:35 p.m. At the international terminal, passengers stampede through a narrow gate, frantically waving passports and boarding passes. Suitcases are flying. The air is rich with expletives. Chaos reigns.
9:45 p.m. At the United Airlines check-in, a ticket agent whisks me through. Will I make it? Dripping with sweat, I look feverish, so a health officer stops me to check for swine flu. No, I reply, just perspiration from flight connections. Running, I am the last to board. Sinking into a plush seat is sheer ecstasy. This sixteen-hour flight with meals on trays, soft seats, toilet paper, and headphones feels like a luxury instead of a curse. As an arbornaut who often experiences the transition from trees to cement, I muse at the world’s definition of “civilization.” With just over 50 percent of humans now inhabiting cities and appreciating the cultural and physical amenities provided by urban life, field biologists remain a minority who would rather confront leopards in a green jungle than traffic in concrete ones. As a bustling, emerging country, India’s trees face degradation in the wake of “progress.” I hope our canopy research efforts will generate enthusiasm for forest research and conservation in India.
Many emotions overwhelm me not only during global travel but also when I’m climbing, especially in a remote place far from my children. Although ascending into the treetops is a joyful experience, it is also fraught with anxiety, caution, and a healthy dose of fear. Climbing trees requires a large amount of trust—in the strength of the branches, the cooperation of Mother Nature, and the grip or “dirt” (the person who stands on the ground to monitor safety). In countries like India, Ethiopia, and Peru where I undertook many years of research, loneliness pervaded at times. It was not always easy to communicate from the upper branches to the people standing below due to language barriers. And it was nearly impossible to communicate with my family half a world away due to lack of connectivity. I often missed holidays, including birthdays, and couldn’t easily convey a sense of the remoteness of many field sites to my family. The demands of international fieldwork make it tough to find the energy for friends and family upon returning home after a rugged expedition. While I always had good intentions of sharing arboreal tales with both boys upon arriving home, I was usually fighting jet lag and couldn’t wait to brush my teeth over a real sink and collapse in a soft bed. All jobs have trials and tribulations—but life as an international arbornaut certainly has its own ups and downs, literally and figuratively!
One of the ups comes from the fact that when I’m dangling from the end of a rope, wildlife usually accepts me as a fellow treetop denizen. I’ve spent many solo hours in Massachusetts temperate forests watching a sapsucker devour caterpillars, sharing eucalypt branches with koalas in the Australian outback, or admiring ants hauling bits of foliage much larger than themselves in the Amazon. India was no exception. At KMTR, working with Soubadra and T Ganesh to implement the canopy toolkit to survey India’s biodiversity, I had some close encounters with our primate relatives. One major project involved establishing permanent plots and monitoring the seasonality of fruiting in the canopy dominant, vedippala. With greatest trepidation, we climbed some precarious twig ladders affixed to several high branches, allowing permanent access, and sat amid a troop of our distant relatives who were enjoying a fruit feast. Like tigers, lion-tailed macaques depend upon vedippala for habitat, but these primates also feed on the fruits and live and play in the branches, whereas tigers are limited in range to the forest floor. Soubadra risked life and limb to study these enormous crowns, bravely using her hand-hewn, rickety ladders (which reminded me of my roughshod scaffolds in the Scottish Highlands). Meeting macaques was thrilling, and the forest birds of India greatly expanded my vocabulary with amazing names like scarlet minivet, brown-cheeked fulvetta, plain flowerpecker, and little spiderhunter. Most were insectivores, and despite their palate for bugs, depended for survival on vedippala. Insects are attracted to eat the tree’s fruits; birds and reptiles in turn consume the insects, and monkeys join the lineup to eat insects, leaves, and fruits. Ecosystems are complex chains of who eats whom, and India’s tropical forests are no exception. The health of this country’s canopy in turn supports iconic wildlife such as tigers and leopards, reinforcing the interconnectedness of ecosystems from top to bottom.
Cullenia exarillata is an example of what ecologists call a keystone species, meaning it impacts the health of an entire ecosystem. Another example is the starfish along North America’s Pacific coast, whose predatory habits prevent any single species from dominating and outcompeting others in intertidal pools. Similarly, alligators represent keystone species in Florida, and crocodiles in Africa, making deep water holes that form oases for other wildlife during droughts. In India, elephants are considered keystone species by acting as ecosystem engineers, sometimes uprooting trees, which in turn has a cascading impact on other herbivores because it destroys the foliage supply, reduces canopy cover, and leads to new tree species growing up in the open space. Because tropical forests have not been as extensively studied as many temperate ecosystems, fewer keystone species have been identified there. Field biologists still don’t really even know what lives in the tropical forests. The notion of a keystone role remains controversial among ecologists because it is not easy to tease apart the complex relationships in ecosystems. But if a species is labeled as keystone, it usually becomes a primary focus for conservation, because if its presence declines, the landscape is predicted to alter or degrade.
Although technology can transmit information around the globe in seconds and photograph outer space, many mysteries closer to home remain unsolved. Scientists have not yet figured out the ecology of vedippala seed rain, germination, and pollination strategies, nor any of the complex interactions of India’s biodiversity within the crown of this keystone tree species. A dwindling number of tigers and macaques surely hope we can do better. Their survival not only depends on the continued fruiting of this tree, but also on a better understanding of how the whole forest works. A recent headline in the Bangalore Mirror read, “Tiger Spotted in Sahyadri Reserve.” One tiger sighting makes national headlines. In this case, biologists had not seen the animal but genetically analyzed its scat on a trail in the reserve. Less charismatic, but equally important, will be the follow-up research on the canopy under which that tiger lives, and how to keep it healthy. Will Princeton University be satisfied with an extinct mascot? Can circuses survive without tigers or elephants in the big top? The world would never be the same if some of India’s most beloved wildlife became extinct, and the next few years will likely determine the fate of these noble creatures.
Another large and charismatic Indian animal is equally at risk, the Indian or one-horned rhinoceros (Rhinoceros unicornis). I had the honor of riding an elephant to count rhinos in Kaziranga National Park with Soubadra and T Ganesh during another field visit. These amazing animals numbered only 2,093 individuals throughout the entire world at the time, depleted by poachers for the Chinese medicinal trade. I found out why before we’d even begun the counting, while sitting at a hotel during dinner and listening to an American biologist brag about watching rhinos copulate for twenty-five minutes, which he claimed was a world record (for rhinos, that is). When this stamina is broadcast, whether it is true or not, people associate rhinos, particularly their horns, with sexual prowess. The day of the count, we arose in the dark to reach the park gates before dawn and find our elephants hired for transport. En route we stopped at a street-side kerosene burner where its owner was selling the tiniest cups of tea I had ever seen, probably one medium-sized mouthful, steeped with milk and sugar. Fortified, we headed into a dark fog, but soon found the meet-up site with saddled elephants, all milling around near a ladder stand built for us to climb up and board our creatures. Soubadra and I rode on Rakumana (named from Indian mythology). Kaziranga National Park boasted the world’s largest remaining population of rhinos, as well as another possible world record of ninety tigers. Riding on native (but tamed) Asian elephants, we were not recognized as humans and so got within twenty feet of the rhinos! It was incredible to view a mother and her baby foraging in the tall grass, shrouded in morning fog. I glanced past our elephant’s butt to catch a streak of orange and black zipping through the underbrush. I can’t prove it was a tiger, but the anxious behavior of nearby hog deer suggests it was, so I am sticking to my story. By sunrise, I felt spiritually connected to this special place, having seen some of the world’s most unique and threatened species from the vantage point of an elephant’s back. As we left, local rangers were on strike. It was a conservation conundrum. Because a recent survey had declared that this park housed a high density of tigers, international NGOs wanted to make it a dedicated cat reserve. But if this status were bestowed, the park would also be subject to more limited visitation, putting local people out of work; some might be forced to relocate. The local rangers wanted to retain the park’s current designation as a rhino reserve and have nothing to do with tigers in any official capacity. If the locals lost their jobs, some could resort to poaching. It was easy to understand why indigenous communities became resentful of international conservation groups who lived half a world away and didn’t always understand the local issues. Because of this conflict, my colleagues hid me in the back of our jeep as we departed, so Indian rangers would not suspect I was a tiger advocate. This illustrated the classic interference of well-meaning global stakeholders from the viewpoint of locals trying to juggle livelihood and conservation.
Without question, the majority of Indian citizens now live in urban environments. The fact that India has successfully conserved 21 percent of her primary forests is a tribute to the country’s respect for trees, but it’s also due to massive urban migration. As India’s economy and population has grown, the pressure on natural resource exploitation has increased. This has prompted the consideration of unconventional partnerships to promote conservation. In his controversial book Half-Earth, the biologist E. O. Wilson advocated for conserving half of the planet for one species (humans) and the other half for the other 99.9 percent of species. His list of a few “best places to save” included India’s Western Ghats, and initial canopy research there confirms the uniqueness of the region’s biodiversity. The Western Ghats exemplify India’s strong sense of spirituality with regard to trees. Indigenous people predominantly practice Hinduism, where the Bhagavad Gita preaches an important moral obligation to worship nature. India houses the highest concentration of sacred forests in the world, with approximately 100,000 to 150,000 stands. Historically, Indians worshiped icons of nature, and even today, Hindu families light a lamp under a sacred tree as a spiritual gesture. Most temples and villages feature at least one large fig (Ficus religiosa), also called peepal or Bo or bodhi tree. F. religiosa was the religious species assumed by Lord Krishna, according to the Bhagavad Gita. This notion of sacred trees may have stopped British rulers from felling India’s primary forests, because they so greatly respected the indigenous religious beliefs. Similarly, the king cobra (Ophiophagus hannah) was a deity associated with many sacred groves in lower-caste communities, giving people an incentive not to kill it. Such interactions of religion and nature illustrate how sacred beliefs directly aid the conservation of a threatened species.
India’s natural resources are inextricably linked to religion, and successfully so. Today, many sacred forests are managed by joint groups of Hindu families or temple trusts, and over five thousand fragments exist in the Indian state of Kerala alone, at the southern range of the Western Ghats. Integration of sacred groves into state-owned protected areas has become a viable solution to ensure continued protection in the twentieth century. For example, Kerala’s government offered financial support to fence and protect over five thousand sacred groves throughout their state. Many trees in India remain protected today because of this unique religious sanctity, instead of their timber value as is the case in many Western countries. It continues to challenge forest scientists who seek more creative metrics to value forests in Southeastern Asia, in the context of religion as an overarching conservation mantra. Perhaps the number of prayers delivered in a sacred forest could somehow be translated into dollars and cents?
As the world learns how to place on trees values other than timber, India has ramped up her forest restoration activities to offset carbon dioxide emissions. During 2019, the state of Uttar Pradesh in India hosted a twenty-four-hour tree-planting blitz, at which time the citizens planted over 220 million seedlings (at least one per person in this populated region) in one day, practically a world record in terms of quantity versus time. Thanks in part to the exact data collected from canopy research about carbon dioxide intake and ultimate carbon storage of whole trees, forests are now recognized as an important weapon against climate change. It is estimated that a billion trees can remove 25 percent of our current carbon dioxide emissions, and India already planted a quarter of that total in one day. Although old-growth stands are the most effective carbon storage units because their large trunks and crowns store more carbon, those seedlings planted in Uttar Pradesh will someday become adults. This additional focus on tree planting is a wise investment for India’s future, and essential for a country of over one billion people.
Vedippala
(Cullenia exarillata)
A SCOTTISH BOTANIST NAMED ROBERT WIGHT defined the genus Cullenia from one sample collected near Coimbatore, Madras, India, and he differentiated it from the genus Durio, its closest relative, by observing that the lobes of the staminal tube were much longer. These species are members of the family Bombacaceae, a global distribution of tropical trees including the silk floss, great kapok, and java cotton. In botany, the first described individual of a new species is called a type specimen. This sets the standard for identification, and type specimens are safely accessioned in herbaria at museums. In a recent publication, Cullenia was revised to reflect updated revisions to the classification of this genus, after careful analysis of morphological variation. To illustrate the technical and almost undecipherable jargon of these taxonomic descriptions, here is the revised botanical text:
