For ecological explorers, the thrill of the chase is reward enough

Blank spaces, dark shapes: The search for lost species is painstaking workUnsolved mysteries are formless and seductive said the naturalist Edward Wilson, are, "like unnamed islands hidden in the blank spaces of old maps, like dark shapes glimpsed descending the far wall of a reef into the abyss".Karthikeyan Vasudevan and Narayan Ishwar know the call of these blank spaces, these dark shapes. It is a drug to the scientific imagination. It is potent enough to spur these young researchers to step away from civilisation and spend 10 months of the year in an abandoned bungalow with no electricity and no running water in the steamy rainforests of Kalakkad-Mudunthurai in Tamil Nadu. There is no great national plan at work here, no established route for these ecological explorers. Rahul Kaul sits in his air-conditioned office at the World Wide Fund for Nature in Delhi, spending no more than a week at a time searching the Himalayan foothills for his quarry, the Mountain Quail, a drab little bird not glimpsed this century. Rajat Bhargava, a struggling ornithologist, trawled the illegal bird markets and the plains of Uttar Pradesh for most of this decade before he found his quarry: Rothschild's Parakeet. After a battle over whether the bird was a hybrid or a true lost species, Bhargava now revels in his status as a new discoverer. "There is," he says, "a great sense of satisfaction."So why do they do it? Financially, it could, at most, mean a research grant. "This means instant fame," says A.J.T. John Singh, deputy director of the Wildlife Institute of India. But like every explorer, these men and women are driven not just by a desire for fame, but sometimes an almost obsessive desire to rediscover legends. Pamela Rasmussen, David Abbot and Ben King, ornithologists from different parts of the US, examined crumbling skins of a lost bird called Blewitt's Owlet in London, pored over dog-eared records of sightings made in the last century and followed a transcontinental trail that finally ended on November 25, 1997 in the degraded shrub forests of northwestern Maharashtra. Even on the home stretch, the little owl almost eluded them. "We found the bird on our last stop, 13 days after beginning," says Abbott.The addiction to explore must be strong, the determination unwavering. Vasudevan and Ishwar have lived their hardscrabble frontier lives for two years. However, their rediscovery of lost frogs and lizards helps them immensely in their main project: studying the fragmentation of some of India's last surviving patches of rainforests, and the effects of this on the myriad, embattled life forms they shelter. And so the search for India's lost creatures continues, if haphazardly and unevenly. In Delhi, Kaul is sure that the Mountain Quail is more than a legend. "We will find it one day," he says determinedly. The quail, however, isn't likely to shake the foundations of ecological science. Sometimes, the thrill of the chase is reward enough.Published By: AtMigration Published On: Aug 31, 1998--- ENDS ---

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For ecological explorers, the thrill of the chase is reward enough

Unsolved mysteries are formless and seductive said the naturalist Edward Wilson, are, "like unnamed islands hidden in the blank spaces of old maps, like dark shapes glimpsed descending the far wall of a reef into the abyss".

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