A synchronised elephant census, covering Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala, where the forests are contiguous, will be carried out by thousands of forest personnel and wildlife enthusiasts to find out the number of elephants roaming the Western and Eastern Ghats, their exact distribution and population structure.
An initiative of Project Elephant, the census, carried out once in five years, will go on for three days beginning Tuesday.
Tamil Nadu is estimated to have an elephant population of a little over 4,000. The exercise is being taken up as elephants are essentially migratory animals, which cover large tracts of forests every day.
For instance, pachyderms in the Nilgiris biosphere migrate to the Kerala forests during summer and return to the biosphere after the South-West monsoon. During the North-East monsoon, they migrate to the Eastern Ghats, say wildlife officials.
On day one, the forest team and volunteers will be involved in block count, in which an area of five square km will be covered. The teams will identify elephant herds by walking in a zigzag manner, covering the entire area.
Apart from identifying the four types (adult male and female, sub-adult, juvenile and calf), the teams will enter in the data sheet the types of forests and the time of sighting, says K. Kalidas of OSAI, a Coimbatore-based NGO.
It is co-ordinating the census with the Forest Department in the Coimbatore forest division and has engaged volunteers for the Sathyamangalam forests.
On the second day, the teams will walk along a two-km-long (transact) line to assess dung density along the way.
“As it is not easy to sight elephants in thick forests, where visibility will be low, the dung density method provides signs of elephants,” says S. Ramasubramanian, DFO, Nilgiris North Division.
This method is used to corroborate the evidence obtained in the block count. The dung density, along with decay rate, is entered into a software program to arrive at the count, say forest officials. Research has revealed that an elephant defecates 16 or 17 times a day and it takes three to four months for the dung to decay depending on the climatic conditions.
The third day will be spent by the side of waterholes where the elephants come at least once a day to quench their thirst, officials say. At the waterholes, it is easier to determine the population structure and the male-female ratio.
“The male-female ratio has definitely improved over the past decade in the southern states because of strict vigilance and anti-poaching efforts of the Forest Department,” says Raman Sukumar, a pioneer in elephant conservation.
