Author: A J T Johnsingh
Publisher: Permanent Black
Year: 2004
Language: English
Pages: 139
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8178240815
Description
Dr A J T Johnsingh grew up near the forests around the Western Ghats, swimming, hunting and fishing. He saw his firs leopard three metres away, as a child. He devoured the stories of Jim Corbett in Tamil translation at a local library, and was hooked.
Since then, he has had a long and eminent career in wildlife biology. In the forests of the Himalayan foothills he has tracked tigers and elephants, observing individual animals over many months. He has waited atop swaying trees, as still as they would allow, observing goral feeding below. He has returned to all the places Jim Corbett wrote of in his famous stories of maneating tigers, and documented the changes.
The essays in this book convey the beauty and thrill of Indian forests and their wildlife to the non-specialist. Dr Johnsingh takes us for walks in the jungle with him, and we see through his trained eyes what we would never otherwise look for.
In each essay he tracks a different animal and tells us not only of his experiences, but also of the habits, biology and current condition of the species he is discussing. The essays are at once a celebration of India's wilderness and a passionate-and informed-cry for us to save it before it is too late.
REVIEW
Going for a walk in an Indian forest with Dr A J T Johnsingh is simply one of the finest experiences you can have in life. There is his good humor. There is joy in his steps when he is walking in the forest. He walks to live, and lives to walk-and it shows. His good feelings set the whole tone of the trip. And you feel good because he is so at home in the forest, As a boy, Dr Johnsingh learned natural history from Jim Corbett's books. As a trained ecologist, he has gone back to those forests and walked those same trails to se how it is now. He reports this to us. In the future, other naturalists will walk the trails that Dr Johnsingh has walked, visit the places he has visited, and record the changes that have occurred in the time that has elapsed.
-John Seidensticker
Contents
Foreword
Preface and Acknowledgements
In the Beginning
Trailing Jim Corbett
The Whistling Hunter
The Tahr Hills
The Leap of the Goat Antelope
The Vanishing Tiger
Mammoths at Love and War
Revisiting Corbett Country
The Flight of the Mahseer
Tracking the Lions of Gir