Carbon
bush
nature conservation foundation newsletter
chat
winter 2010
The super cunning fox
Rishi Kumar
Red fox, (Vulpes vulpes), belongs to the
genus Vulpes, of the Canidae family. The
members of this genus are referred to as
true foxes. The largest of the true foxes,
the red fox is found across the entire
northern hemisphere and is the most
common member of the order Carnivora.
Most of us know the story of the
‘fox and the crow’ where the cunning fox
outwits the crow and deprives the poor
bird of the piece of cheese. Several of our
field staff have strories of foxes stealing
myriad things including soap cases,
butter, tea, meat and leather wallets from
field camps. In one instance, there was a
constant fight between two camp-mates
over ‘who drank the milk kept aside
for the morning tea’, until the day the
culprit was discovered to be a red fox!
In the cold deserts of Spiti, the
red fox shares the rugged mountains with
a majestic predator; the snow leopard. In
north America, cougars are known to kill
red fox. I have often wondered if similar
interactions would exist between the fox
and the snow leopards. Red foxes would
obviously avoid a physical confrontation
with the larger snow leopard. Nonethe-
less, they have to share the same habi-
tat and some amount of interaction is
inevitable. Our camera-traps in Spiti have
revealed several instances of snow leopards
and fox passing by the same site within
hours of each other. Snow leopards mark
their territories through scrapes, scent
marks and defecation at prominent places.
Marking is like putting up a signboard
claiming ownership of a property and
signaling your presence in the area.
I wondered if it was difficult for
the fox to eke out a living under the
constant shadow of the snow leopard,
until I came across this sequence of
photographs, which caught the fox red-
handed in its fabled act of being cunning
and smart. A snow leopard had deposited
a scat on a prominent ridgeline and gone
away. Six days later a fox visited the same
spot and deposited its poop bang on snow
leopard poop, effectively replacing the
large cat’s signboard with its own. From
the sequence of camera trap photographs,
it does look like a deliberate act.
So with just one smart move, the
fox had outwitted snow leopard as well as
the researcher who might spend months
analyzing scats in a laboratory only to
realize that not all of them belonged to his
study species; the snow leopard. n
see camera-trap photos on page 2&3
storage in
fragmented
forests
M O Anand
To many of us, nature conservation is
really an inconvenience. Conservation
imposes direct economic costs most
of which are borne by the people who
live closest to the natural resource
being conserved. In contrast, most of
the benefits of conservation are rather
intangible, rarely feature in matters of
economics, and are enjoyed by people
who live far away and bear none of the
burdens of conservation. This dichotomy
is one of the most important challenges
to conservation, both philosophically
and practically. Two prominent attempts
to better-distribute the economic
costs and benefits of conservation are:
payments for biodiversity-friendly
landuse, and for ecosystem services.
At some level, the overlap
between the conservation requirements
for biodiversity and ecosystem services
is rather obvious. For years we have
accepted that the forests that house our
remarkable biodiversity are also vital for
providing us water and buffering us from
climate change. But a more fine-tuned
understanding of the ecosystem processes
that link biodiversity, ecosystem services
and their changing environment to
one-another is still poorly developed.
Developing such an understanding is
the main focus of my research. I work in
contd on page 2
 bushchat
Coorg, which is important not only as
India’s coffee capital, but as an area of
rich and unique biodiversity. In addition
to vast forested tracts along the district’s
borders, the landscape is dotted with
hundreds of small rainforest patches,
each rarely more than a few dozen acres,
which have been spared conversion to
coffee plantations or rice fields 50-
200 years ago because they are sacred.
Although these forests may appear
pristine to the casual observer, the truth
is that years of isolation, compounded
by frequent use by people have made
the physical structure and species
composition of the tree stands within
these fragments somewhat different
from un-fragmented forests. In these
fragments I am trying to understand
how habitat fragmentation – which
is quite widespread across all tropical
forests – affects tree communities,
and consequently the carbon storage
ecosystem service provided by them.
I was fortunate to work with
a very competent and dedicated team
comprising three local students. A
few field botanist colleagues too spent
substantial time with us in the field,
helping setup the study and identify
trees.
Vegetation plots formed the
fundamental units of this study. Here, we
would mark a square of 25m side, within
1 1 winter 2010
Photographs of the super cunning fox
Images for article on page 1
which we would locate all trees above
a certain minimum size, identify their
species, and measure their girth and
height. These bits of information were
then used in an allometric equation,
which estimates of the biomass within
each tree. Numerous such plots, located
in fragmented and un-fragmented
forests and compared by various
statistical methods begin to throw some
light on the fate of tree communities
and carbon stocks in fragmented forests.
Preliminary results contain
both good and bad news. I observed
that overall carbon stocks did not seem
to vary too greatly from un-fragmented
to fragmented forests in our study sites.
Fragments, however, had a highly
depleted crop of young trees, suggesting
poor regeneration. One would expect
that as these fragments aged and the
standing large trees died, there would
not be many to take their place, thus
endangering the future of carbon
storage in these fragments. In the
coming months, my research will focus
on developing a better understanding
of the ecological processes that
bring about these patterns. Such an
understanding is important in the This sequence: A snow leopard marking a site through defecation followed by a fox that defecates right on the snow leopard’s scat.
context of planning strategies for
the conservation of biodiversity and
ecosystem services. n
 bushchat
Sujatha Ramesh I have a Master’s degree in
Psychology and have worked with an organization
for with differently-abled children in Mysore and
later as a soft skills facilitator in an IT company.
Living in Valparai and Munnar for
nearly 15 years before coming to Mysore (for
my children’s education) was an experience that
will be hard to forget. Encounters with wild life
at close proximity was something that happened
almost daily which I really miss. I have now
joined NCF as an Executive Assistant in the
Western Ghats programme.
Nisarg Prakash I completed Bachelor’s degree in
biotech engineering, although I never wanted
to be an engineer. I then worked with Nityata
Foundation for two years and field work exposed
me to Bandipur, Coorg and Periyar. I’ve recently
(finally!) completed a Master’s in Wildlife
Biology and Conservation from NCBS-WCS.
For my dissertation, I studied the effect of land-
use on occupancy and habitat-use of otters in
the Anamalais. Some of my current interests
are rainforests, modified landscapes, streams and
rivers, hornbills, and small carnivores.
Vaibhav Chaturvedi I have a master’s degree in
Environment Management from the School of
Studies in Environment Management; Vikram
University in my home town Ujjain where I also
used to run a student organization for conservation
called Srishti. In 2010, I joined NCBS as a student
trainee to familiarize myself with techniques in
conservation genetics. During this time I started
working on snow leopard samples from Himachal
Pradesh collected by NCF and subsequently
joined the High Altitude Program in September
2010. My current work involves analysis of the
genetic data and individual identification of
wild snow leopards using non-invasive genetic samples. My long term interests lie in
population, behavioral and spatial ecology of large carnivores (especially vulnerable
populations in fragmented habitats) and their conservation in India.
TO
4
Nachiket Kelkar Currently I am a research
affiliate with the Oceans and Coasts programme
at NCF, and am based in the Lakshadweep
Islands, studying coral reef and seagrass fishes,
green turtles, and surveying reef bleaching. For
my M.Sc. in Wildlife Biology and Conservation
(at NCBS-WCS) I studied the ecology of
Ganges river dolphins in relation to fisheries,
in a human-dominated riverscape in Bihar,
and continue working with local conservation
teams there. Recently, I was part of a project
funded by the Conservation Leadership
Program, U.K. on effectiveness of protected
areas in conserving freshwater fish species
in the southern Western Ghats. I have been
involved in research on riverine and estuarine
fish communities, Irrawaddy dolphins, spiders,
moths, plants, dry-land agriculture, wetland and
grassland management and urban biodiversity.
My current interest is in studying conflict,
conservation and coexistence of wild species
and humans, in the aquatic realm. Other
interests include spatial ecology of animal
populations and communities, population
ecology and estimation, freshwater and marine
ecology, Bayesian statistics, conservation
planning, fisheries and agricultural systems,
natural history, field geology, economics,
writing, poetry and literature.
Design pavithra@me.com
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