The Story Of A Establishing A Wildlife Sanctuary

 From The Heart Of Nature by Pamela Malhotra is the story behind the creation of a private forest sanctuary in India. An excerpt:

I have been privileged to witness this love and devotion upfront and personal on several occasions over the years. And it has been the matriarch’s trust in me and tolerance of my presence that has made these close encounters possible.

The family group that regularly visits our sanctuary is led by the largest female Asian elephant I have ever seen. And yet, the most recognizable of the group is another older female who had lost over half of her tail. We have no idea how or when that half was lost, but it makes her easy to spot and distinguish from others. Naturally we call her ‘Cut-tail’, her presence in her own smaller family group making it easy to distinguish them from others whenever large numbers of elephants happen to be in the sanctuary at one time—something that has happened on a regular basis over the years, especially during the dry season when water and food are scarce in drier forests elsewhere.

Smaller family groups searching for adequate water and food will converge within our sanctuary grounds at these times, the smaller units being parts of the larger extended family gathering. Most of the elephants are related to one another—mothers and aunts, sisters and daughters with young male elephants as well. Older males stop staying exclusively with their family group once they are in their early teens. For the next several years, they wander between their own and other family herds. They also eventually join groups of other bachelor males, where they test their strength and establish their place in the male hierarchy through mutual sparring. As youngsters, they will seek out older males to learn more about the ‘male way of life’, older bulls often play-fighting with younger males as well, actually getting down on their knees to spar with the youngster—a wonderful display of empathy and just plain fun on the part of the big bulls.

Males reach full maturity at about the age of thirty, with the onset of ‘musth’—the time when bulls can be aggressive due to their bodies being filled with hormones which drive them to seek out females in season, in order to mate. But they visit family herds, especially their own, periodically in any case, and not just during musth. They, like male tigers, are not necessarily the ‘loners’ we humans mistakenly thought they were. We do have regular visits from solitary males, but they also join the group visits of Cut-tail’s extended family from time to time.

It was during one such convergence that the love and dedication for their family members was dramatically illustrated right below our home.

The elephants had been with us all day spending much of their time down at the river eating bamboo and drinking the fresh cool water. It was my birthday—8 March—which coincided with Holi that year—the festival of colours that celebrates the coming of spring, with Nature displaying her own myriad hues in the blossoms that burst forth in the forest. Even as night fell, the elephants continued to stay on, giving Anil and me the opportunity to enjoy their presence that much longer until we went to sleep around 11 p.m.

It was after midnight when I was awakened by several elephants trumpeting away just below my bedroom window. It was clear that they were very upset about something, but what? I woke up Anil and the two of us went out on to the upstairs balcony to see if we could figure out what was wrong. The full moon was shining brightly overhead in a cloudless sky, illuminating the entire area with its radiant silver light. But to see even better, we switched on the powerful outside search lamps that shine on the grounds below and around the house.

Elephants were everywhere, trumpeting away and clearly very upset. Then we saw what was causing their distraught behaviour. One of the younger elephants had fallen into a pit and could not get out, the pit being part of our septic system. When building the house, we purposely separated ‘grey water’ generated from the kitchen and bathing areas from toilet water, the water from the toilet being piped into a series of pits that isolates solid matter from liquids for further decomposition to avoid polluting the surrounding land.

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The original system had been further enhanced with two more pits that lay outside our boundary wall. Initially, there was no wall around the house area. But when the aviary was built and the rescued lovebirds became permanent residents, I had to go out every night to cover their sleep cages to insulate them from the cold winter temperatures that are normal during that time of year—low temperatures that the lovebirds would not be able to survive being left uncovered and exposed. On very cold nights, I even put hot water bottles on the bottom of the sleep cages to ensure extra warmth.

Excerpted with permission from From The Heart Of Nature by Pamela Malhotra, published by Penguin.

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