Lets have some good news for a change, I'm going to recount an interesting case of natural afforestation taking place on my beautiful school campus. Back in my days the school campus seemed so large to us, well it was large, some 200+ acres of land surrounded almost all around by
a stream and the whole campus was situated in an idyllic valley nestled amidst the Blue Mountains of south India. It was reasonably forested back then - mostly by tall eucalyptus trees, wattle trees, some conifers and a fair amount of under-brush which provided us hungry boarders with sustenance! Boarding School food is notoriously bad but ours seems to have hit a new low because not only was it difficult to send down the gullet it was in such small quantities that we found ourselves almost as hungry after the meal as before the meal. The result was that we boarders reverted to the hunter-gatherer mode of our ancestors and spent all our free time scouring the hillsides for food. Outside the campus, beyond the little stream that was the school boundary the Badaga farmers grew carrots, potato, radish, cabbage and cauliflower. It was forbidden for us to step out of bounds but if the hunger pangs got real bad we raided those potato fields, stuffed the tubers into our jerkins and made a dash for the wood-fired boilers behind our living quarters. There we roasted the spuds and ate them with much relish. Ofcourse, if the seniors came to know you wound up roasting the spuds for them to eat! One of our chief pursuits in the under brush was the hill guava or the clogger as we called it because of its effect of constipating us if we had too much of the small, tasty fruit. When nice and ripe the clogger could give any fruit a run for its money - it tasted so good to us hungry souls. But I digress, I was trying to tell you the story of afforestation wasnt I? Well suffice it to say that we hunter-gatherers back then kept the under-brush under control by simply moving about the area and not allowing it
to grow over. The fauna was limited to some jungle fowl, jackals and maybe a few birds like the bulbul, warblers, bush quail and a few doves - nothing really remarkable. Today the school delivers the most awesome food and what is perhaps most important is that the quantity is not limited - boarders can eat as much as they please. This satiation seems to have resulted in the atrophying of the hunter-gatherer tendencies of present-day pupils of my alma mater. As a result they no longer forage for food 'down the banks' and the under-brush has over grown to such an extent that animal life has returned to the old valley possibly because every where else they go there is de-forestation but in old Ketti valley the story is panning out in reverse! The range of animals you now find on the campus is impressive, if not scary! Look at this picture of the valley taken a year ago (2008) , notice the lack of forest cover all over the valley - the only forested area is the area that forms the school campus! There have been numerous sightings of panthers, elephants, giant Malabar Squirrel, monkeys of different hue and ofcourse plenty of wild boar and jungle fowl. Now isnt that a happy story, one of the flora and fauna getting back their due, after all its their world too!
Check out this picture of a giant Malabar squirrel, taken by yours truly in 2007 right in front of one of the cottages we boarders lived in! That's a Luckote tree there, we regularly plucked, ripened and ate those Luckotes - today the satiated kids in school leave the Luckotes to the Malabar squirrel to eat - no man-animal conflict here!
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