Prowling in tea country to save the leopard
Wilderness & Wildlife Conservation Trust’s Anjali Watson and Dr. Andrew Kittle are on a mission in the Highlands of the country. Kumudini Hettiarachchi and Oshani Alwis report
SSunday, March 25, 2018 tunning, sleek and spectacular, yet powerful and graceful, are these tawny and spotted creatures as they stride along the mountain ridges, masters of all they survey.
Let them live………protect their territory, will be the earnest and fervent plea to tea companies in the Central Highlands on behalf of Sri Lanka’s biggest predator – our very own Big Cat, the leopard.
Panthera pardus kotiya which is a sub-species unique to the country, not found anywhere else in the world, is tragically an endangered species.
This impassioned plea will go out to the tea industry on Tuesday from Founding Trustees Anjali Watson and Dr. Andrew Kittle of the Wilderness and Wildlife Conservation Trust (WWCT), who have been following the pug-marks, picking up the scat and surreptitiously ‘stalking’ these beauties wherever they are spread across the island, since the early 2000s and more recently in the Highlands.
Having established that leopards are very much a part of the composite landscape of the Highlands, a “new and mixed protection” is what they are proposing for the ridges to give a fighting chance for leopard survival.
It is this novel initiative not only to protect leopards but all wildlife in the area drawn up with the support of Biodiversity Sri Lanka (a national platform driven by the private sector to promote environmental conservation), that they hope will become a reality with tea plantation owners taking it as their own with guidance from the Department of Wildlife Conservation (DWC) and the Forest Department (FD).
The tea companies have been fully supportive of the original study and some of the early measures proposed and Anjali and Andrew are hopeful that the initiative will be taken to a different level.
It comes at a time when the United Nations (UN) celebrated World Wildlife Day on March 3 on the theme, ‘Big Cats – Predators under threat’.
Anjali and Andrew turned their gaze towards the unprotected areas of Hapugastenna, Maskeliya, Upcot, Norwood and the Bogawantalawa Valley, bordering the Peak Wilderness when eight leopard-deaths reported from the area in early 2016, shook their very being.
This area is also the watershed forest for the Castlereigh and Maskeliya reservoirs and Anjali is confident that tea companies battered by low rainfall know the necessity to protect it.
The leopard is a charismatic apex predator, playing a vital ecological role. Having already studied these elusive creatures in the Horton Plains National Park and the Peak Wilderness, both Protected Areas, working closely with the DWC and the FD, the duo launched their study in the bowlshaped Bogawantalawa area replete with carpets of tea as far as the eye can see and lots of people.
The area has a ‘matrix’ of tea estates, eucalyptus and pinus plantations, riverine and ridge forests, grasslands, forest corridors and borders of the Peak Sanctuary and the study focus was simple but important for the conservation not only of the leopard but all biodiversity.
“We wanted to better understand the ecology and movement of the Highland leopards within this mixed landscape,” says Anjali.
A meeting among the tea companies, the DWC and Anjali and Andrew at the Colombo Office of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) was the positive precursor to the research which got underway in August 2016, with the estate managements and the ground staff giving unstinting cooperation.
Fanning out from the Dunkeld Conservation Station which was the base generously provided to them by the Dilmah Tea Company’s leisure arm, Resplendent Ceylon, they carried out the field work which is still continuing, on 34 estates/divisions covering 750 sqkms, ranging from Hapugastenna in the west to the Bogawantalawa Valley in the east and Castlereigh in the north to the inside edge of the Peak Wilderness in the south.
Meticulously, they collected data by speaking to the people, clambering up slopes to set up remote cameras, 70 in all, to capture these felines, scooping up scat for analysis and peering closely at pug-marks. It was not only the leopard density that they studied but also the diversity of other mammals and their abundance which would be a pointer to what the Big Cat predators pounced on as prey.
“One of our goals was to figure out where the leopards are – their presence or absence and along with the setting up of cameras we too walked through the area looking for signs, scrapes and pug marks. The photographs captured by the cameras help us estimate leopard density in that particular landscape and enable the identification of individuals based on the spotting patterns,” says Andrew, referring to density estimate studies from August 2016 to August 2017.
Regarding leopard behaviour in the area, Anjali says that they are resorting to “temporal niche partitioning” by using time separation – the leopards avoid the daytime as there is high human activity then, becoming active at night.
The study has also found that the places where the eight leopards had been killed were not close to human habitation but in forest patches where wildlife is present proving that the leopards had not been getting close to humans but that humans had been going after them by setting snares.
The charges against the voiceless leopards that they were preying on domestic animals such as dogs, Anjali gently refutes, explaining that scat-analysis indicates otherwise. In the leopards’ diet, domestic animals constitute only a small percentage when compared to wild prey.
This is why Anjali and Andrew are urging human-wildlife including leopard co-existence as estate workers are given their own homes with plots of land and engage in cultivating more vegetable plots and independent tea plucking.