 The lyrical ‘peee... coo, coo’ calls of the laughing thrush are back in the Nilgiris forests with an increased frequency, reminiscent of its vintage past, thanks to a check on conversion of its woods and grasslands into plantations. The lilting squeal of the endemic songbird, heard across an incredible distance of almost half-a-kilometre, had been on the vane till the recent past until the state government initiated steps to stop the practice of growing coffee along the fertile slopes of the rolling hills.
Natural vegetation, so essential for the survival of the laughing thrush, was facing a sad depletion in the region, much to the threat of the brownish-black bird with a speckled breast, usually seen on reaches of an 1,800-metre elevation known as Shola forests. A steady trend of increasing human settlement in the terrain further acted as a major “disturbance” for the rare species of bird.
Realising this, the state Forest Department stepped in last year and ordered a ban on cutting trees and permitting coffee plantation in a big way. The city-based Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History (Sacon) estimates that the mapped area of Shola forests has a total laughing thrush population of nearly 1,400.
“The area in its vicinity will be having another 400 such birds. The thrush in the plantation belts should total another 200. In short, their total number in the Nilgiris forests should be roughly 2,000,”
according to Dr Lalitha Vijayan, a senior
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scientist with Sacon. She told UNI that the estimates had been made after arriving at the average density of the thrush population in the area.
It was one bird inside the protected areas, while the density depleted to one in three hectares outside the national park.
The Nilgiris has a very long history of human disturbances, dating back to the time of the British. The human population in the biosphere reserve increased from 3,000 in 1812 to more than 7 lakh in 1991. This was more than double of what was 50 years before in the area, as per an environment survey by the
Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Science.
Dr Lalitha pointed out that the natural landscape had changed considerably over the years with a large extent of the areas having been brought under plantations of tea, wattle, eucalyptus and pine, besides crop-fields. Also a series of dams, reservoirs and tunnels have been constructed and a large number of small townships and industries have come up along with a network of roads.
 Dr S N Prasad, another Sacon scientist, observed that there had been 47 per cent decline or degradation of evergreen forests in southern Western Ghats during 1960 and 1988. “This has probably led to the decline of many species, especially the endemic varieties, because they need special habitat requirements,” he added.
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