Not a great deal to report today – we had an entire zone of the park to ourselves this morning – just one of those vagaries thrown up by the Byzantine workings of the Park Service. It was a very peaceful safari with some good views of Nilgai (the first that I’ve seen here), Gaur (two seperate large family groups) and large numbers of Barasingha and Chital. Both the two deer species are sympatric so are frequently seen together on the meadows at Kanha. The park is described as the N’Gorogongo of India, and while that is an exaggeration, there are mornings when you have large populations of ungulates and you get some sense of what stable ecological systems might have looked like. There is no doubt that the numbers of ungulates here don’t compare to the numbers from a century or so back. George Schaller makes that clear in The Deer and the Tiger, citing Forsyth’s Highlands of Central India and others. As an intriguing historical footnote though Forsyth does suggest that both Lions ( commonly found in the Narbada Valley in the 17th Century) and Wild Elephants were also once part of the fauna of the region. (I’m not sure how reliable this is as it stands although lions did once range as far east as Bihar, but it certainly possible that both lion and tiger did once encounter each other in the wild, despite their preference for different habitats.) They would next meet again in the Roman Circus. Neither lions or elephants do very well around human beings , lions prefer the sort of open landscapes that are attractive to pastoralists and elephants need a lot of room to roam. Once again it means that the shifting baselines of the habitats and inhabitants (biota I believe is the correct term) make it hard to evaluate the ecosystems here. They are almost certainly faunally impoverished or depauperate (another conservation biologists term). As wildlifers we are too late to bear witness to the whole , a condition that the Romantic poets knew well – As Yeats (who began his career as a late Romantic put it in the first line of the first poem in his first published volume;

‘The Woods of Arcady are Dead

And over is their Antique Joy’.

The habitat at Kanha has vastly improved since 1965 when Schaller was here. In there is a glowing testimonial from Schaller at the Visitor Centre in the middle of the Park. Most of the villages have been successfully removed (albeit painful and traumatic presumably at the human level) from the core area, which has dramatically improved the numbers of barasingha and other ungulates. And where there is prey of course there be predators.