Changing traditional notions of wildlife conservation

Vidya in the field 

Vidya and her team with 'Ajoba', the first leopard to be radio-collared.

It was pure serendipity that Vidya Athreya became an ecologist. When her husband’s work took the family to Junnar in rural Maharashtra, Vidya saw a human-dominated landscape that was also the hub of a high number of leopard attacks. “Nobody had really studied it before and since we were living there, it fascinated me.”

Around this point in her career, Vidya had been working as a ‘wildlife biologist’, focusing solely on animals. But the Junnar experience made her realise that no discipline of study in India is devoid of humans. This was the beginning of a lifelong project — later named Project Waghoba — that saw her researching the relationship between humans and leopards.

Her decision to become an ecologist was of significance in a country that, amid rapid urbanisation, was witnessing a troubling demarcation between human and wildlife spaces, without a holistic understanding of either. Vidya's fresh approach to the subject made her among the country’s foremost researchers on human-leopard interactions.

Complex profession

While a wildlife biologist only observes animals, an ecologist is a scientist who surveys and studies many animals (including humans) living within an ecosystem, their habitat as well as the environment. Researchers like Vidya work alongside the government, the forest department, wildlife NGOs, conservation organisations, research institutes and citizens. Stakeholders, including urban dwellers in a maximum city like Mumbai or village folk in the rural hinterlands, also become collaborators in such studies.

After earning her Master’s degree in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from University of Pondicherry and Iowa, she went on to work for the Centre for Wildlife Studies. Currently, she is with the Wildlife Conservation Society – India.

Between the early 1990s and 2001, Vidya was part of several projects studying large cats — the passion for which had started young. “I’ve always liked cats because my mother used to really like cats and, at all times, there were around six cats at home,” she says.

And yet, Vidya’s shift in her area of research, inspired by her time in Junnar, sounded ridiculous to urban conservationists who didn’t see the need to study animals in a rural setting. “My colleagues, especially older experts, thought I was cuckoo! It was also challenging at that point because I was very young and I was a woman.” And while the situation is better today, it’s still rare to find a woman large cat biologist.

One reason for this, Vidya believes, is the masculine aura created around ecologists or conservationists, especially of big cats. The National Geographic and TV personalities like Bear Grylls further fuel the popular perceptions around the profession. “The Western idea of wildlife biology is very macho, where you are in the forest. But it’s a lot more nuanced and complex than just an alpha-male image,” she says.

Monotonous but enjoyable

While wildlife research in a data-deficit country like India is no cakewalk and permissions take forever to be granted, “we have a great baseline for conservation,” says Vidya. “India is the only country that houses so much biodiversity despite so many people. This is especially true of large predators because of our shared cultural history found in local myths and stories,” she adds.

Much of research in any field is also uneventful and boring, she warns, and rarely do you get to do something with the animal. “I once did 600 interviews in a village. So a typical day would involve travelling on a bike to the village, interviewing about eight houses a day and asking them about their livestock loss. So, much of the fieldwork is monotonous but enjoyable.”

It is a demanding career but because this field has been studied so little in India, there are many new things to find. So if you find something new, have faith in yourself and pursue it, Vidya says. There are great opportunities for ecologists in NGOs and academia but the wildlife NGO sector remains under-appreciated in India, and independent research institutes don’t have as strong a footing as their government counterparts.

Today, wildlife scientific training is rooted heavily in Western philosophy, which believes there should be no wildlife in human landscapes. But humans and wildlife, not just leopards, have shared space in India for millennia and our only option is to continue to do so with minimal conflict.

“My aim as an ecologist is to change this mindset. The focus of an action shouldn’t be the animals; it should be the people,” Vidya says.