Shadowing Elephants: The Story of Kallar

We are standing in a banana field at twilight. As the darkness thickens, the oddness of the scene makes itself evident. Banana plants here aren’t growing straight up. Some are crooked at 45-degree angles. Some are drooping, others have given up and are flat on the ground. At first, we wonder if it’s just the light playing tricks. We are in Vedar colony, Kallar, a few hours from Coimbatore city. Perhaps there is intercropping in the field, I think, and I’m looking at different kinds of plants. Until it becomes clear that something else had stood in the place I am in, helicoptered its trunk around, and had a great time eating bananas and stalks. There were elephants here.

Once we realise this, we train our eyes on the moons on the ground — crescents, gibbous and full moons — varying kinds of elephant footprints in the mud.

Forty-year-old Nirmal Dominic owns the crop field we are standing in and has surveyed the damage. He has a knowing look on his face as he examines the field. But he’s also smiling. “We were almost done with the banana harvest,” he says. “The elephants took the rest of it.” He is not too upset at the losses because most of his crop was already harvested. Dominic is a Tamil who was repatriated from Sri Lanka to Tamil Nadu in 2005. He says he also saw elephants in Sri Lanka, and the animals remind him of both countries. 

The next day, I go to the nearby forests and count animal tracks and signs as the sun beats down on the land. There is a mound of something that looks like wrinkled, lineated wood. It has a happy bouquet of mushrooms shooting out of it. This is verdant elephant dung. Famously, as elephants release their droppings, a veritable forest — trees, plants and fungus — takes root from it. The ground is like a map waiting to be read. Elephants fed and dropped their dung here. A wild dog sniffed around there. There are tracks that animals have made — important passageways, animal roads in their own right —marking this land-map. We see many footprints. Wild dog. Jungle cat. Sambar. Chital. In some places, the tracks interconnect with each other; in other places, animal roads intersect with human roads and national and state highways.

We go through the Kallar corridor. It connects a large contiguous elephant habitat patch (that includes Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary, Nagarhole, Bandipur, Mudumalai, Sathyamangalam, Biligirirangan Tiger Reserves, and Cauvery, among others) with another habitat patch (that includes Silent Valley, Mannarkad and Attapadi forest divisions). It falls within the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve and is about 177 square kilometres. Part of a global biodiversity hotspot, this corridor is crucial for several wild animals, especially elephants. The area’s topography signifies that not all areas can serve as wildlife passages. In this corridor, the slopes of the Nilgiris are on one side, and they act as a natural barrier because elephants can’t climb steep slopes easily. Both people and pachyderms covet the low-lying areas of the corridor.

In some places, animal movement is restricted because of roads, buildings and other structures. Hairpin bends on roads also make it difficult for people and elephant herds to see each other. A typical “pinch point” occurs when elephants are pressed between a steep slope, an electric fence, or a busy road. Sometimes, several factors exist all at once. For example, at one spot next to NH 181 (Coimbatore to Ooty highway), there are slopes of the Nilgiris on one side and Swami Satchidananda Jothi Niketan School on the other side. This leaves a gap of only about 140 metres for the elephants to squeeze through.

“The point of this wildlife corridor is to keep the animals moving. To give them safe passage from one area to another. We don’t want them to linger,” says D. Boominathan, Landscape Coordinator, Western Ghats Landscape, WWF-India. 

Through field observations, WWF-India and its partners have identified a few areas along the corridor which require freeing up so that elephants can move easily. The state government horticulture garden, for instance, is next to a highway, and the fencing around it hinders movement. Finding the pinch points on a corridor is crucial towards bringing about practical change. 

There is some good news from the corridor. For years, WWF-India has been advocating for moving a green tax toll booth on NH 181. With the combined efforts of the Tamil Nadu Forest Department and the local administration, this structure has now been moved. A flyover is also planned on the national highway so elephants can move freely below it. “It is a classic example of how the collective effort of various players can come together to secure a wildlife corridor,” Boominathan says. A similar intervention in Lumding elephant reserve in Assam has shown good results. The Doboka-Silchar National Highway, NH 54, was being upgraded. After studying suitable spots, underpasses were made for elephants and other wildlife. Now vehicles move above, and the animals move below; there haven’t been reports of elephant mortalities on the stretch.

That is not to say that all threats are gone from the Kallar corridor. More needs to be done to keep the corridor a coexistence zone for people and wildlife — it takes constant work. 

It takes a lot of electricity to fell an elephant — but they do fall and die when they touch fences which are illegally electrified to very high levels. In these parts, the story of Chinna Thambi (the word means “little brother”) is legendary. Chinna Thambi was an elephant who foraged with his brother. He lost his older brother to electrocution; he himself was captured and taken to an elephant camp in the Anamalai Tiger Reserve. 

Around Dominic’s field in Vedar Colony, there is an elaborate setup to prevent elephants from coming in. An energised fence with a moderate electric charge dangles, suspended from a line, like a strange bohemian curtain. Just before the fence, a trench has been dug. That evening, as the sun slipped below the horizon, the only light was pinpricks from our phone. It was the time for elephants. 

Nine elephants visited the field one day before our visit. And the night we visited, more elephants came, managing to negotiate the trenches and fences. 

The point isn’t to pretend elephants aren’t there. The point is to be prepared for them — this will likely be through mechanisms like assured compensation to farmers who face crop damage, better lighting to aid visibility for locals, and ensuring there is no blockage for wildlife movement in the corridor. 

Nilgiris Biosphere is one of the largest contiguous habitats for Asian elephants in the world. The vistas are gorgeous, and as construction creeps in, some places need to be managed as free of construction and obstruction. The footprints on the ground tell their own story: keeping the corridor clear for elephants here would potentially impact hundreds of pachyderms and countless other creatures. 

This is the second part of the corridor series, in association with WWF-India, which highlights different facets of wildlife corridors in India. The first part was featured the Yamuna corridor that acts as a critical link for wildlife moving between Himachal Pradesh and the Shiwalik ranges.