PUNE: Peak summer arrived in the district with the mercury almost touching 40 degree celsius, and the forest department officials said enough
watering holes had been recharged and marked in the Pune forest region.
“There are around 300 to 400 watering holes, both natural and artificial, in the forest land of the Pune and
Solapur districts,”
Vivek Khandekar, the chief conservator of forests of the Pune region, said.
The forest department claims all of these have been amply recharged over the past few months in anticipation of the high summer temperatures.
They deployed tankers in collaboration with local bodies like panchayats, and with other grassroots organizations and ecofriendly groups. Some watering holes are inside wildlife sanctuaries, which are key habitats for many endangered species of birds, deer, and predators like leopards. Some of these animals have often ended up in human settlements looking for water in the hot and dry summer months.
There is a plan to stop the physical count of watering holes, a practice discontinued by most other forest departments, because of the logistics and better observation techniques. Such a count is popular among wildlife experts and enthusiasts. Already, geo-referencing techniques have been started on a trial basis in various places, based on which many of the watering holes have been filled over the past few months.
“We are thinking of using new methods like camera traps, geo-referencing, and satellite imagery to map watering holes in forests and hills. There have already been some trial runs. The potential phasing-out of a physical census is in the works because of the sheer amount of work involved in observing a waterhole sitting perched on a machaan. We have also seen that frequent human interventions into the forested areas to count and assess the watering hole has too much of an intrusive effect on wildlife growth ,” Khandekar added.
