Habitat loss

Eastern Himalayan Botanic Gardens #EHBA is proud to be associated with the first Pakke Paga festival in Arunachal Pradesh to recognise the role played by the local Nyishi tribe in conserving hornbills in Pakke and to tell the world about the wonders of the Pakke Tiger Reserve

According to World Wildlife Fund, the rapid loss of wildlife species today is estimated to be up to 10,000 times higher than the natural extinction rate. We are watching them disappear on a daily basis. It is astounding.

The North Eastern (NE) region of the India is a biodiversity hotspot and represents one of the highest avian biodiversity of the Indian subcontinent. The region is ecologically represented by the Eastern Himalayan biome and is rich in a number of endemic flora and fauna. Several avian species inhabiting this unique ecosystem are not found or reported anywhere else in the world.

• The Greater Adjutant stork (Leptoptilos dubius) could once be found from India to Southeast Asia in the hundreds of thousands. Long despised and treated as a pest, this giant, ungainly bird is Endangered by habitat lost, with just 1,000 remaining by the 1990s.

In early 2015, scientists monitoring satellite images at Global Forest Watch raised the alarm about the destruction of rain forests in Indonesia. Environmental groups raced to the scene in West Kalimantan province, on the island of Borneo, to find a charred wasteland: smoldering fires, orangutans driven from their nests, and signs of an extensive release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. “There was pretty much no forest left,” said Karmele Llano Sánchez, director of the nonprofit International Animal Rescue’s orangutan rescue group, which set out to save the endangered primates. “All the forest had burned.”

Policy decisions in wildlife are rarely rooted in science and are often a result of political processes. In countries like Norway and North America, with their high quality and quantity of wildlife science, hunting of wild animals is culturally acceptable and carried out for harvesting meat, recreation, tradition and empowerment of rural communities. Culling is also carried out in response to human-wildlife conflict, despite lack of evidence of its efficacy.

Even as the man-elephant conflict rages across the State, a village near the Bhutiachang tea estate in Udalguri district has shown that it is not quite impossible to maintain a ‘peaceful coexistence’ with elephants. The No. 4 Bhutiachang village which has been frequented by elephant herds for decades with the debilitating consequences of human fatalities and crop loss, has evolved an innovative approach that is visibly easing the tension between man and animal for the past couple of years.