Asiatic Lion expert interview

[Guest guest]

http://www.illahee.org/lectures/archive/ravichellamlecture Ravi Chellam " Living

with Lions: Culture and Policy "

*

Dr. Ravi Chellam* is the world’s foremost expert on the Asiatic Lion, once

widespread and now restricted to a few hundred individuals in western India.

He has been studying wildlife and working for its conservation in India

since the early 1980s. He studied the endangered Asiatic Lions for his

Ph.D., conducting field research for more than four years beginning in 1986.

He has since retained an abiding interest in the ecology of these highly

endangered animals and also in their conservation - both in the Gir Forests

and in western India - as well as by translocation to establish a second

free ranging population of lions in India. He is currently supervising

students researching lions and leopards.

 

Dr. Chellam has been with the Wildlife Institute of

India<http://www.wii.gov.in/>since 1985 and has been on secondment to

the United Nations Development

Programme in New Delhi since 2002, where he is managing biodiversity

projects in the Sustainable Environment and Energy Division. He has inspired

numerous Indians to take up wildlife research as a profession and also

raised public support for the conservation effort both within and outside

India. He helped guide the National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan

for India, an intensely participative process over three years. He serves on

the Editorial Board of *Conservation and Society*, a recently launched a

journal with the objective of encouraging and showcasing inter-disciplinary

work in the field of conservation. In addition to his work on lions and

lepards, Dr. Chellam has studied the ecology of reptiles, amphibians and

small mammals. His lion research is described in detail in David Quammen’s

latest book, *Monster of God*.

 

*LECTURE SUMMARY*

Illahee has hosted several authors, and numerous scientists, but last week’s

event was unusual in that one of the finest environmental writers we know,

David Quammen, introduced and conversed with the wildlife biologist, Dr.

Ravi Chellam, who inspired, and is featured in, his latest book, *Monster of

God*.

 

Their relationship started off inauspiciously, when Quammen contacted Dr.

Chellam by phone, and after exchanging information was abruptly admonished,

“Good God man, I can practically hear the money flowing through the phone

line! Haven’t you ever heard of the internet?” Click.

 

It took a while, but Quammen is now fairly adept at using email. Presumably

this new skill has come in handy as he stitched together a meditation on the

role of large “man-eating” predators around the world, visiting with brown

bear experts in Romania, salt water crocodile aficionados in India and

northern Australia, Amur tiger biologists in far eastern Russia, and Dr.

Chellam and his lions in western India.

 

Along the way we get a thoughtful review of humans’ relation to fearsome

predators, from the pelt counting of ancient Mediterranean monarchs to the

role that man-eating monsters have played in myth and religion: Gilgamesh,

the Leviathan, St George’s dragon, and so on.

 

But Quammen’s narrative really starts with a city boy from Bombay, well on

the way to a prominent business career, who takes break to study at the

Wildlife Institute of India. Among his first assignments from the boss: go

check out the lions in the Gir Forest Preserve in western India.

 

This is where Dr. Chellam steps in and recounts his story. Chellam is a

keen intellect and has a nose for the bottom line, so his first instinct was

to make sure he had a reasonable study subject. Were there enough lions to

study and could they be observed frequently enough for him to collect

meaningful data? His first week or so looking for lions was not

reassuring. He found only scat, pug marks and killed prey. When, at the

end of his first week in Gir, he finally saw his first lions, they wandered

to within 30 meters of him. Now he was reassured that he had a study

subject, but a bit nervous about the casual nonchalance of these big

beasts.

 

Dr. Chellam began by introducing us to his lions with a series of slides:

males, females, subadults, lying in dry grass, walking along pathways or

roads, near water, on a kill. The audience assumed these shots were taken

with a telephoto lens until they noticed Dr. Chellam’s shadow in several of

the photos, which would put him 10 to 20 meters from an animal that could

kill him in a few seconds if it wanted to.

 

With little comment on this unsettling proximity, Dr. Chellam went on to

describe these lions’ habitat, the 1400 square kilometer (a little larger

than Multnomah County) Gir Forest Preserve, a scrubby tropical teak

woodland, dry for much of the year, with virtually all of its 20 to 40

inches of rain coming during a three month monsoon season, when according to

Chellam “you can literally see the grass growing.”

 

“Forest Preserve” is a little misleading. Livestock, mainly water buffalo,

has been grazed in the forest for centuries. And lions have been there even

longer, with their population at one time dipping to a few dozen at best

(presently there are somewhat more than 300).

 

A census in the late 1970s showed that only 6000 wild deer were available to

the 200 or so lions. Not a recipe for long-term stability. So the Gujarat

Forest Department bought out and relocated many of the resident Maldhari

herders. The result: wild deer went from 6000 to 150,000 in fifteen years,

and the lions’ diet went from 75% livestock to 65-70% wild species.

 

A few hundred Mahdari herders remain in the Gir forest, typically living

with their herds within a thorny enclosure called a “ness” from which they

venture each day looking for forage and water. This strategy helps keep

lions focused on the more available deer population.

 

Lions can eat a lot of meat quickly. An adult can gorge on 50 to 60 kg at a

feeding and then not eat for almost two weeks. If they don’t completely

strip a deer or water buffalo after a kill, they’ll drag it off into a bush

for feeding later.

 

Males and females are not found together very often in Gir. They mate and

then go their separate ways. Males do however form coalitions. A typical

group of males has a home range of 100 to 140 square kilometers. A typical

female group takes 40 to 80 square kilometers. Unlike African lions, males

in Gir can actually hunt because the denser vegetation provides them

camaflague. Also, the chital deer in the Gir forest are so small that

everyone, males and females, has to hunt. Males tend to be the ones to take

livestock, where as females won't take that risk.

 

One of the main thrusts of understanding the biology of the Gir lions is to

find a suitable location to introduce a second population, so that there is

a back-up should anything (such as disease) befall the Gir lions. Dr.

Chellam has found a promising location in the Kuno forest about 1000 km

away.

 

But he has run into two problems. Herders and farmers in Kuno are not

thrilled about having a livestock- and human-eating predator introduced

(they feel they’ve got all they can handle with the resident tigers). And

surprisingly, the Maldhari aren’t too keen to share “their” lions, which

they are now proud of. The lions make their corner of India unique. On a

more self-interested level, they figure as long as the lions are restricted

to the Gir Forest, it will survive as a preserve and their status quo as

herders will be preserved. In short, they have a good deal and they don’t

want to jeopardize it. A third problem may be that there are tigers in

Kuno, but Dr. Chellam believes the tigers and lions “will figure it out.”

 

Toward the end of his talk, Dr. Chellam showed a slide of his first

photograph of a lion, which is special to him. It was during his first trip

to Gir, and when a group of four lions came within 15 meters of him and his

guide, a young boy, he was unsure what to do. The boy said, “We should just

stay here and watch them.” The lions wandered past unconcerned, but Chellam

was so unnerved, he forgot to photograph them until the last one was almost

out of sight.

 

In his four seasons in the field he has had hundreds of encounters with

lions, has been charged dozens of times, has really only been seriously

threatened once, and has learned to negotiate such a close approach to these

lions that the click of his camera shutter sometimes startles them.

 

Dr. Chellam’s final slide showed two lions ambling down a forest road with a

public bus kicking up dust on a few dozen meters beyond. The massage: here

in the Gir Forest Preserve lions and people have reached some kind of

accommodation. For the Maldharis, lions actually protect the status quo, so

a few livestock lost to these predators is the price they pay.

 

Among the many questions:

 

Q: Is poaching a problem?

A: No, it is very rare.

 

Q: How will the Maldhari adapt to modernization?

A: We don’t know but it is happening already, with motorcycles replacing

camels, and many children going off to school because the opportunity for

herding is limited. We know this: if the Maldharis are eliminated from Gir

there will be big changes in the ecosystem. We would like to reduce the

daily incursion of livestock from outside the preserve, but we have to do

this slowly because lions still depend on livestock for 30 to 35 percent of

their diet.

 

Q: Why don’t Gir lions attack?

A: They do. There are about 12 to 15 attacks and one death per year.

Eighty percent of the attacks happen outside the forest. (Lions living

outside the preserve are much more dangerous.) The circumstance of an attack

usually follows one of four patterns:

The lion finds itself surrounded by people.

The lion takes a livestock animal and a herder attempts to run the lion off.

The lion jumps over a ness and in the ensuing chaos a person is attacked.

A lion directly attacks a person, usually asleep.

 

Dr. Chellam has noted that lion attacks rise sharply a few years after (and

not during) a drought. He thinks that drought years are good ones for

lions: plenty of weak and dying prey. But once the weak ones are gone, the

few remaining livestock are vigorously defended. So lions and people both

want access to this limited resource and both are willing to fight for it.

 

Q: Might a limited gene pool spell trouble for these lions?

A: They’ve already been through a genetic bottleneck (about 100 years ago)

and they seem to be fecund and reproducing well. The bigger worry is some

kind of livestock-borne disease, which is why we’d rather have the lions

feeding on wild prey.

 

Q: What role does fire play in the Gir Forest Preserve?

A: Fire has not been carefully studied in Gir. We do know that most fires

in the ecosystem are human caused.

 

A note to the audience: Both David Quammen and Ravi Chellam remarked that

they enjoyed their presentation in Portland, and particularly the large and

engaged crowd that welcomed them and offered them insightful and challenging

questions and dialogue. A note from Illahee: Thank you audience. You made

us look good.

 

ill'-a-hee (chinook language): earth, ground, land, country, place, or

world