Gopakumar Menon (ELP 2001) | Negotiation and Leadership Specialist, Navgati, India
It’s the morning after World Wildlife Day – a happy coincidence – and my friend and colleague, Hanumanth, and I are on a long walk in the gorgeous forest of Pakke Tiger Reserve, accompanying two sprightly, agile and knowledgeable forest guards.
We stop frequently, for there is so much to see and heaps to learn. A swishing sound to our left? “That’s the wreathed hornbill,” Lakkiram and Gumbo say in a matter-of-fact way, even as I can hardly curb the urge to go Whoop! (and do a jig maybe). Moments later, they identify a call as coming from the white throated bulbul, another endemic bird in these parts of the North-east, and one more from the gray peacock pheasant, which, from its photo, must rank among the most exquisite in the rarified world of avian beauty.
... and you think you look good in a mirror?
Raptors, elephants, leopards, tigers, clouded leopards, gaur, barking deer, sambar, marbled cats, serow…this is an enchanted forest.
The guards are in their elements and identify mushrooms, orchids, shrubs and trees with ease – the Nahor with its fresh red leaves, giant trees of elephant apple (its seed, they say, makes for a super anti-dandruff shampoo), duabanga grandiflora, with its gorgeous flower and a dozen others.
Duabanga grandiflora, a name richly deserved.
Their knowledge combines learning with intuitive understanding and, in a substantial yet understated way, they belong here. Three days earlier, we had watched in admiration as four forest guards in Manas National Park undertook a controlled burn of a grassland patch to enable fresh growth; they were thirty feet away from a herd of - hold your breath – fifty-four elephants and one busy no-nonsense rhino.
And forest guards across India do this every day. They fight fires that, in summer, could be raging in dry forests of tinder, patrol beats on foot in particularly hazardous territory – one of them was trampled on by an elephant in Bandipur Tiger Reserve a few weeks ago - keep poachers of wildlife and timber at bay with antiquated weapons and raw courage, dissuade noisy, brain-dead tourists from being, well, noisy and brain-dead and monitor the general health of the forest. As teams they are under-staffed across India, under-equipped, under-paid and, often, under-nourished and they live in the most basic – we should emphasize that: the most basic – conditions, yet they are there, doing their job.
Real heroes do not wear capes.
We cross a dried river bed with just a trickle of water flowing through it, and reach our destination: an anti-poaching camp with four guards. Tang Rooh is the most seasoned one among them and he grins when I ask him to hold my neck for a photo as though I were a poacher he had caught stealing his glass of tea. His knowledge is immense and we listen with admiration to this reticent, humble man: when it rains, he says, that trickle turns into a raging torrent and these men are marooned for weeks. On one such occasion, he laughs, they had the occasional unsettling company of a wild elephant.
Three heroes, two fawns.
Time to show off...
Half an hour later, the tea has been sipped, a few photographs taken, the small talk done and it’s time for us to leave. We tell them that we cannot imagine how they are able to do what they do. And that, to us, each of them is a hero, no less.
Their smiles make our day.
World Forestry Day March 21st
