According to the India State of Forest Report,Arunachal Pradesh lost 74 sq km of green cover between 2009 and 2011. The price for that was paid, among others, by 18 families of hoolock gibbons - the only apes found in India - near a village called Dello in the Lower Dibang Valley district. K Reena, divisional forest officer of the Mehao wildlife sanctuary division, says the people around Dello practise slash-and-burn farming. To expand their farmlands, nearby tree cover has been sacrificed. And the easy-going gibbons are tree-dwelling .
In Dello, says Kuladeep Roy of the Wildlife Trust of India (WTI), as their trees have been felled, the gibbons have been forced onto the ground in search of food. On the ground, though, the usually-agile gibbons are clumsy - their longer arms and shorter legs have evolved for travel through the trees - and extremely vulnerable to attack by predators.
The gibbons then, says Roy, had to be rescued. The 18 families, all in dire straits, were identified and a plan hatched to save them. Human climbers were to be sent into the trees to force the gibbons down, who would be caught and relocated to the nearby Mehao wildlife sanctuary. Rescue operations began in November last year, under the auspices of the state forest department, with staff coming from the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) and WTI, and funding from the Noyen Melendez Family Trust and IFAW.
Roy, a primatologist, says the first family they moved had been confined to only one tree. There was no other tree left nearby for them to travel to. "It was obvious then that they needed to be moved." As proof, he offers the following grisly fact: Of the four families caught and relocated so far, two gibbons have had serious injuries. One was missing a hand and another had had an eye gouged out. But do all the animals need to be moved? Could a future be made for them in Dello? Have they been relocated to the right spot? Roy says "scientific study" still needs to be done.
Mehao is already home to the hoolock gibbon, so the sanctuary should make a good home for the relocated apes. But the IFAW-WTI team is still trying to understand the ape's exact range (how much territory does one family need) because releasing a family too close to earlier residents will only lead to attacks.
And then there is the other, bigger problem. Man is eating into animal habitat. According to the India State of Forest Report, the seven northeastern states - which together make up a fourth of the country's forest cover - lost 549 sq km of forests between 2009 and 2011. Until we change that, says K Sankar, who heads the department of habitat ecology at the Wildlife Institute of India in Dehradun, "conservation is a losing battle" .
In Dello, says Kuladeep Roy of the Wildlife Trust of India (WTI), as their trees have been felled, the gibbons have been forced onto the ground in search of food. On the ground, though, the usually-agile gibbons are clumsy - their longer arms and shorter legs have evolved for travel through the trees - and extremely vulnerable to attack by predators.
The gibbons then, says Roy, had to be rescued. The 18 families, all in dire straits, were identified and a plan hatched to save them. Human climbers were to be sent into the trees to force the gibbons down, who would be caught and relocated to the nearby Mehao wildlife sanctuary. Rescue operations began in November last year, under the auspices of the state forest department, with staff coming from the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) and WTI, and funding from the Noyen Melendez Family Trust and IFAW.
Roy, a primatologist, says the first family they moved had been confined to only one tree. There was no other tree left nearby for them to travel to. "It was obvious then that they needed to be moved." As proof, he offers the following grisly fact: Of the four families caught and relocated so far, two gibbons have had serious injuries. One was missing a hand and another had had an eye gouged out. But do all the animals need to be moved? Could a future be made for them in Dello? Have they been relocated to the right spot? Roy says "scientific study" still needs to be done.
Mehao is already home to the hoolock gibbon, so the sanctuary should make a good home for the relocated apes. But the IFAW-WTI team is still trying to understand the ape's exact range (how much territory does one family need) because releasing a family too close to earlier residents will only lead to attacks.
And then there is the other, bigger problem. Man is eating into animal habitat. According to the India State of Forest Report, the seven northeastern states - which together make up a fourth of the country's forest cover - lost 549 sq km of forests between 2009 and 2011. Until we change that, says K Sankar, who heads the department of habitat ecology at the Wildlife Institute of India in Dehradun, "conservation is a losing battle" .
No comments:
Post a Comment