The Hindu Business Line : The hills are alive with diverse species

AN airy soup of fog, clouds and rains, blown around by a stiff wind in the forest park at Amboli hills in the Western Ghats, reduced vision in the evening to a few feet as we went searching for frogs, toads and snakes. Amboli, situated 690 metres above sea level, is not a national park or a sanctuary; it can be termed as a reserve forest under the Forest Department of Maharashtra. For frogs and toads, monsoon is music (mating) time and experts like Varad can identify the amphibians by their varied notes piercing the hum of falling raindrops without as much as sighting them.

From overhanging trees near a tank one heard the tak tak notes of the Malabar Gliding frog (Rhacophorus malabaricus). After some search one spotted the green frog pasted to a leaf as it called to its mate. The camouflage was perfect. As the evening turned dark the beams of light from our torches could make out at least 30 to 40 frogs calling at a high pitch. Varad Bhagwan Giri caught one of them and passed it on to me for a close look. The Malabar Gliding frog has a green top, the webs are a bright red, while its toes are a sparkling yellow with the lower parts whitish. For a few minutes one was lost staring at the colouration when Giri broke in, "They say the tiger is beautiful to look at. What about this frog which glides from tree to tree." One did not see the frog glide but saw the foam nest at the end of a branch just above the tank. Perhaps, the fungoid frog (Rana malabarica) is about as flashily coloured as the Malabar Gliding frog. Varad picked one from a field and one was impressed by the distinctive brick red top of the fungoid frog. J.C. Daniel in the Book of Indian Reptiles and Amphibians describes it well: " Bright orange red, yellowish red, or crimson, from the tip of the snout to vent distinctly separated from the black of the flanks... ; the upper lip is white while the throat and chest are often wholly brownish black or black."

From somewhere in the darkness, Varad picked up a bicoloured frog (Rana curtipes) with a grey upper and black bottom. On the first day it was about 11 in the night when a young wildlifer living in the area passed on information about the Indirana frog species. Varad, Sameer and this writer went over to the spot to find a male specimen resting near a hole on a tree with the hole bearing white eggs. "This species is endemic to the Western Ghats and its breeding habits are not known," said Varad examining the frog. One saw the dark brown Koyna toad (endemic to the area) all over the place with one specimen being a bright yellow.

On Saturday, we made the trek to Parikshit Point with the sada at the top. One first read of the sadas in the Sanctuary magazine (June 2005) issue where Aparna Watve writes of the Plateaus of Life: The Sadas of Maharashtra. "Although botanists have long known that sadas (the local name for lateritic plateau) contain rare plants, surprisingly little is known about their general ecology and biodiversity. Sadas are present in the Konkan and Malabar regions too, at altitudes of around 50 metres, but the ones at altitudes of 900 metres that are exposed to around 6,000 mm of rainfall are the ones that have the most unique diversity. For casual observers, sadas are vast expanses of infertile rock. Even geologists refer to them as baren landscapes...," Aparna writes.

Amboli, close to the borders of Karnataka and Goa, receives about 350 to 400 cm of rainfall per year. Trekking up to Parikshit Point to walk the slippery black rocks is not as tough as one was told. To the question what on earth is a sada, Aparna has an answer: "Thousands of years ago, the parent basalt rock of the Western Ghats underwent chemical weathering under moist conditions. Water leached out almost all the soluble minerals from basalt and the residue simultaneously hardened owing to formation of iron and aluminium oxides. In most hilly regions, reddish lateritic soil is abundant. But in certain conditions, laterite occurs as a platform or plateau technically known as "duricrust" and if rich in iron, "ferricrete."

The appearance of the duricrust is so stark and different from the surrounding vegetated areas that it has a special name in local land classification. It is called a sada in Marathi and local people, especially the shepherds, are knowledgeable about several types of plants that are unique to the sadas."

Small and big green karvi plants jutted out from the rock corners or in the spaces between rocks and it was somewhere here that one of our group got a caecilian.

For a non-expert a caecilian can pass as an earthworm but Amboli for Varad Giri is caecilian land and on our trip we snapped up nine caecilians. Caecilians are legless, burrowing amphibians with an elongated body. Unlike worms they have eyes, teeth and a skeleton and Varad had spotted a couple of years ago a new species of caecilian and named it Gegenophis danieli.

Standing on a rock at the sada one could not see much of the valley stretching below with the thick white fog and clouds working like sliding doors to give brief glimpses. Our group included Sameer, Ishaan, Pramod, Vithobha Hegde, Shetal, Chinmoy and Nicole, and all of them were into snakes and frogs.

On the first afternoon at the Green Palace Hotel, Sameer showed us a snake — Pied Bellied shield tail, endemic to Western Ghats. It is a lustrous non-venomous snake with green and yellow colours and was a pleasure to handle. At the tail end, there is a shield which helps burrowing and falls in the group of rough tailed burrowing snakes.

Sameer and Varad were cautious handling the green pit viper as it is venomous, though there were no inhibitions in the case of the green vine snake, which Sameer found hanging asleep from a tree branch. When caught, it threateningly opened its red mouth with nothing more to it.

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