Can wildlife and slash-and-burn shifting agriculture coexist? This question led me into remote rainforests of northeast India in 1994 for a field research study in Dampa Tiger Reserve, Mizoram. In December 2013, nearly two decades later, I went there again. From the Anamalai hills in south India, I travelled across the country to initiate a comprehensive bird survey in Dampa, including a resurvey of my old field sites. As a prelude to other writings I will post here in the days ahead, I post below an edited version of an article about my work in Dampa in the mid 1990s. This article first appeared in the May/June 2007 issue of Wildlife Conservation magazine (a remarkable periodical published by the Wildlife Conservation Society, which after a print run of over 112 years, perished with the recession in 2009). Original PDF here.

  • A jhum fire speeds upslope in a field at the edge of Dampa Tiger Reserve (photo from 1995).
  • Found only in northeast India within the country, the capped langur is a leaf-eating primate that prefers mature rainforest habitat. (Photo courtesy: Ramki Sreenivasan)
  • A farmer in Teirei village clears his jhum field (photo from 1995), cutting bamboo and pioneer trees in a secondary forest that has regenerated on land that was cultivated and then abandoned ten years earlier.
  • When mature rainforest is cleared, as occasionally happens, all vegetation including tall, mature trees are cut, to the detriment of species dependent on undisturbed habitat. (Photo courtesy: S. U. Saravanakumar)
  • Open fallow: a jhum field in its first year of abandonment after cultivation.
  • The grey bush chat is a bird of the open fallows. (Photo courtesy: Ramki Sreenivasan)
  • In the early years of forest succession, bamboos establish rapidly and dominate the vegetation, along with some pioneer trees.
  • Mature rainforest in Dampa Tiger Reserve
  • Village of Damparengpui (December 2013)
  • A teak monoculture established in the buffer zone of Dampa by the Mizoram Forest Department in erstwhile community jhum lands.
  • Forest cleared for establishment of monoculture rubber plantation: worse than jhum?

The heat from the fire is intense, even from a hundred metres away. The entire slope is ablaze. Piles of slashed vegetation and tens of thousands of bamboo culms that had sun-dried for three months burn ferociously. The bamboo hisses, crackles, and explodes, audible a mile away. Hot gusts of wind scud the fire upslope, throwing branches and small trees ten metres into the air. High above, unmindful of the billowing fumes, swallows and drongos, in a frenzy of activity, hawk insects. Ash and smoke darken the sky, reducing the sun to a dull orange ball. In twenty minutes, almost as rapidly as it started, the fiery spectacle ends. On the soil, only a blanket of smoldering ash and tree trunks remain.

… This post first appeared in my blog on the Coyotes Network on 31 January 2014. Read more in the The Wild Heart of India: Nature and Conservation in the City, the Country, and the Wild.