Shola-Grasslands in the Palani Hills

As the summer sun makes its presence felt in Central and North India, the land heats up tremendously to form a low-pressure region overhead. Moisture-laden winds are pulled in from the Indian Ocean, and by June, they surge inland to collide with the southern Western Ghats. Rerouted upwards, these winds cool down as they ascend, forming heavy clouds anxious to spill the southwest monsoon rain. The rainwater flows through rolling montane grasslands into stunted evergreen forests tucked in the valleys. These forests, locally known as sholas, soak up the water, releasing it over time to the plains below.

Such shola forests and the adjoining grasslands together form shola-grassland mosaics in the rippling montane regions of South India’s Western Ghats. Found at the highest elevations of these mountain ranges, they are rather isolated systems, a characteristic that led them to be christened “sky islands”. The montane grasslands are prime habitats for Nilgiri tahrs, while the adjacent forests are home to several endemic flycatchers, laughingthrushes, and the elusive Nilgiri marten.

In the Palani Hills, an eastward extension of the Western Ghats, lies Kodaikanal, a popular summer getaway from the heat of the plains below. An artificial lake at the centre of this hub is an organised chaos of ringing cycle bells, clip-clopping horses, the occasional warning of gaur around the corner, and the practised yells of food stall vendors. Kodaikanal’s popular tourist attractions are thronged on the weekends, but right above the lake, between the aptly named Upper and Lower Shola roads, thrives a lesser-known gem — 25 hectares of somewhat untouched forest, the Bombay Shola.

A morning walk down Upper Shola Road will have you listening to the jarring honk of a school bus barrelling down the road, immediately followed by the medley of birds calling from the dense foliage — white-eyes, canary-flycatchers, nuthatches, and scimitar-babblers. The damp understorey supports cascades of fungi, and quick peeks under rocks reveal a host of amphibian and arthropodal life. A visit last year was marked by us admiring a white-bellied sholakili by the roadside as vehicles whizzed past, running over a phone that slipped out of my pocket (a discovery I made with shock once the sholakili’s spell was broken).

The hills around Kodaikanal are dotted with such fragmented shola patches — Bear, Blackburne, and Mathikettan sholas, to name a few. The fall of these forest systems has been lamented for a while, and justifiably so. But far more extreme is the decline of the montane grasslands accompanying the sholas — roughly 66 per cent of these grasslands have been planted over in the last four decades as compared to the 31 per cent of shola forests lost. Exploring the Upper Palanis in search of weather less like the sweltering heat of Madras and more like the cooler temperatures back home, the British set up Kodaikanal town in the 1840s. They introduced exotic timber species such as wattle, eucalyptus, and pine to support local needs and, perhaps, to recreate the English countryside. The propagation of such monocultures was further boosted by the forest department in the 1960s, a misguided attempt to afforest “barren” grasslands. These fast-growing exotics easily took over the landscape, and the shola-grassland system shrunk over time.

As the grasslands vanished beneath the choking blanket of invasives, they took with them many endemic species. Birds like the Nilgiri pipit now call from slivers of open space, and the range of several plants like the popular neelakurinji (Strobilanthes kunthiana) has dwindled greatly. The immediately obvious solution would be to clear the plantations and allow nature to restore itself. In fact, this was the crux of the Madras HC’s decision in 2014 when it ordered the annihilation of eucalyptus and wattle from the Western Ghats. But the problems accompanying this effort are multifold.

Clear-felling these exotics does little to stop them as new saplings emerge from the stumps, growing to refill the space. So any effort to truly eradicate them requires them to be pulled out by their roots, a highly labour-intensive process. Waves of other invasives will also flood the cleared land before the grasslands can make a comeback. Most interestingly, a new perspective towards the perceived invasion was presented roughly a decade ago, causing some conservationists to pause and reconsider their stance on the issue.

For years, people working in the Palani Hills observed shola trees growing in mature plantations and assumed that the exotics had taken over what was once a thriving shola forest. However, Bob Stewart and Tanya Balcar, self-taught botanists and founders of the Vattakanal Conservation Trust, proposed a different theory — that in the shade of soaring eucalyptus and wattle, the shola trees were the ones taking root anew. Shola forests are made up of stunted trees that require protection from elemental extremes like frost and fire, a property that originally confined them to montane valleys. So in plantations unregulated by manmade fires, working under the protection of towering invaders, shola trees were slowly taking over the understorey. Clearing such plantations could be counterproductive as the new sholas would be exposed to harsh weather, impeding natural growth. Plantation clearing is also a rather indiscriminate method; valuable native species could be accidentally lost in the process.

While there are conflicting views on the clearance of such plantations — besides invasion, the blame for water scarcity issues has fallen on these trees — they continue to spill over into grasslands, tightening the noose on these threatened habitats. A study by Arasumani et al. (2018) identifies these remaining grasslands and recommends physically removing invaders from such spaces. They also propose the calculated clearance of mature plantations considering the possible native growth within.

The shola-grassland mosaic forms a beautifully balanced landscape in the Palani Hills and other ranges in South India. A hike through an isolated grassland patch near Kodaikanal led us to a smattering of Nilgiri tahr droppings, providing hope that this endangered animal was holding its ground in what was left of its habitat. The open space high above afforded us a bird’s-eye view of the Palani expanse — a jumble of vast plantations, homes, and the occasional tract of native growth. The shola-grasslands here may never reclaim the montane sea they once ruled, but there are pockets of this ecosystem still flourishing in the Palani Hills. To allow these remnants to disappear without so much as a whisper would be an unpardonable crime.