Tea and Tigers

Explanation: Welcome to the beautifully manicured tea plantations of south India!

Tea is honored and cherished throughout India, which produces some of the finest in the world. We are in the southern Western Ghats mountain range of south India, where tea plantations have reigned across the landscapes for many generations.

However, there is a conflict.

The southern Western Ghats is also home to a string of disjunct parks and nature reserves, including tiger reserves. Being separated, tigers, elephants, and other large mammals have a difficult to impossible time traversing the modified tea landscapes to travel from park to park as they once did before the land was so converted.

Note the tea plantation estate here, and the lone worker in the tea fields.

However, some of the tea industry has receded in recent years, opening an opportunity for acquiring some old, fallow tea plantations and converting them back into forest environments to facilitate corridors and connections among the parks, up and down the Ghats range.

Such is the case with tea plantations bordering Periyar Tiger Reserve that adjoins some of the tea plantations highlighted in this week's photos.

Here, strips of mature forest have been retained, that can
serve as windbreaks and stormbreaks for the plantation
as well as provding some degree of habitat for birds and other wildlife.

It was in such residual forest structures that I found many bird species
including owls, ioras, parrots, and others.

And here are fine examples of more windrows within
the tea landscape. Thin as these tree lines are, they can
still provide some degree of protection and travel lanes
for some wildlife species.

As older tea plantations can be allowed or encouraged
to succeed back to forest, such landscapes
will provide greater cover for larger species
such as tigers and other predators,
to move between parks and preserves.

EPOW - Ecology Picture of the Week