Tholpetty Wildlife Sanctuary

---

I had been told that the bus from Perambuvoor to Mananthavady would take six or seven hours. It did not. It took almost ten hours. I caught a bus from Kothamangalam to Perambuvoor at 8am. I figured that was an early enough time to start off. After waiting about ten minutes at the Perambuvoor station my next bus arrived and at 9am I was off. The bus was one of the government KSRTC buses, as I almost always end up on, and it was packed. There are 50 seats on these buses but they can easily fit another thirty or forty people on in the aisles. It wasn't so bad. After an hour I got a seat, and there I remained for the next nine hours. We finally rolled into Mananthavady after dark, at 6.45pm. It had been a very long day. The sole reason I was there was because Mananthavady was the closest town to the Tholpetty Wildlife Sanctuary - I went there the next morning to find that it was closed...

When I got off the bus in Mananthavady I looked up and down the street, and saw a sign for a Tourist Home. They were charging 700 rupees per night (about NZ$14) so I had a little walk and around the corner found another one, called the Hotel Riviera, which was 500 rupees. It was also probably the dirtiest place I've stayed in a long time. In terms of other accommodation if anyone else is visiting Tholpetty, I found out that there are several places to stay within a few hundred metres either side of the sanctuary's entrance. I don't know what they cost, but they look like average to expensive in price. There is also some accommodation in the sanctuary which would need to be booked online.

Mananthavady is up in the hills, which I didn't know, so the temperature is quite tolerable. It's not as cool as the Munnar area, but it is just hot rather than unbearably hot. Your skin might burn in the sun, but you're not risking bursting into flame as may be possible in some other parts of the lowlands. Night-time gets nicely cool.

The animal I wanted to see at the Tholpetty Wildlife Sanctuary was the black-footed grey langur. All the grey langurs of India and Sri Lanka used to be treated as a single species, called the entellus or hanuman langur. Then they were split into about seven species based on DNA and differences in colour and habits. It seems mostly solid. The black-footed grey langur is Semnopithecus hypoleucos and it has one of the more restricted ranges of the group, with Tholpetty being at the heart. There are some disputes as to the extent of the species' distribution because some authors treat part of the southern plains langur (S. dussumieri) as this species (e.g. the Indian field guide doesn't even accept the dussumieri, instead dividing it between hypoleucos in the south and entellus in the north, thereby giving the latter species a distribution of almost the entire northern half of the subcontinent).

The sanctuary is 25km (about 40 minutes) from Manathavady and there's a road running right through the middle to the town of Kutta on the other side. Beyond Kutta is the Nagarhole National Park which has very expensive jeep safaris, out of my price range. There's a bus that does the Mananthavady to Kutta route, and this goes directly past the entry point to the sanctuary. I knew there were jeep safaris here (which currently cost 600 rupees for the jeep and 300 per person for the entry ticket), but I had also seen a couple of references to there being walking safaris as well which are preferable for me from both a birding perspective and a money perspective.

The guy at my hotel's reception said the first bus to Kutta left at 6.22am which was an oddly specific departure time. I didn't catch that bus because although I left the hotel at 6am I had to first find an ATM. I try to get out 2000 rupees every day, but as soon as you miss two or three days (usually because you can't find a working ATM, or you're in a village without any) your wallet is suddenly empty. I also didn't know how much the sanctuary might cost and didn't want to get out there and not be able to afford the guide. I couldn't find the first ATM I was directed towards, the second one had no money, the third one had no money, the fourth one had no money. At 6.30 I finally found one which could give me cash. India's great.

I caught a bus at 6.45am. On the way through the sanctuary there were chital (spotted deer) and bonnet macaques by the roadside. The driver let me off at the entry checkpoint. I had seen two different opening times for the sanctuary, 6am and 7am, both very early for an Indian park. However it was now about 7.30am so either way I was going in. Except I wasn't. Because the sanctuary was closed. There was some sort of dispute going on with the jeep drivers, and without jeep drivers there were no safaris, so no entry. What about tomorrow? Nobody knew, and I wasn't going to waste days sitting in Mananthavady hoping things would get worked out by tomorrow or the next day or the next day. The walking safaris were also not an option because everyone denied these were ever a thing. So I'd spent a long time on buses to get here for nothing. India's really great.

All was not necessarily lost though. I asked the guard at the checkpoint if it was okay to walk along the road, expecting an immediate no. But he said that was fine, so long as I didn't go into the jungle "because it is very dangerous". (Jungle in Indian terms isn't rainforest, as Westerners understand it to be, but rather the dry or scrubby forests typical of India). I was hoping I might be able to see some langurs in the forest along the roads, so I set off in the direction of Kutta which is a few kilometres further on. On one side of the road is a coffee plantation and on the other mostly scrub and patchy forest. There were quite a few birds, mostly common Indian species (including a flock of about thirty hill mynahs, and a Malabar grey hornbill). An unexpected bird was a yellow-rumped flycatcher - I knew what it was because it is a distinctively colourful species that I've seen several times elsewhere in Asia, but I couldn't find it in the Indian field guide until eventually I thought to look in the Appendix at the back for vagrants. I walked most of the way to Kutta then came back to the checkpoint and kept going in the other direction.

Just after a kilometre or so a passing jeep full of forest guards stopped and demanded to know what I thought I was doing. I said that the guard at the checkpoint had told me I could walk on the road, but they said that was not allowed and I had to go back immediately. This interference in my plan to just walk back to Mananthavady looking for birds and monkeys wasn't a loss either, as it turned out. About fifty metres back along the road there was a little stream running through a culvert under the road, and here I had caught a glimpse of what I had assumed would be the common three-striped palm squirrel. When I was walking back past I saw the squirrel had come out on the stream-bank and, although it was scooting in and out of the undergrowth, I realised that it was actually a jungle striped squirrel which is endemic to the Western Ghats area and was the last of the Funambulus squirrels I had yet to see (there are six species, all found in either India or Sri Lanka). It was bigger than I expected, roughly the size of the palm squirrels but chunkier. The back is a very dark brown through which the pale stripes run, and the head and tail have a distinctive red tint. It's not quite as nice as the flame-striped squirrel of Sri Lanka but it's close. I only got one photo, and it was not in focus.

Nearer to the checkpoint I stopped to look at a male plum-headed parakeet in the top of a tree. They are common here, but always worth looking at. Then a Malabar barbet suddenly flew in and landed almost next to the parakeet. Like the squirrel this is also a Western Ghats endemic and one I hadn't managed to see before. It sort of reminded me of a Gouldian finch with its red face and green body. Up in the air behind the tree were numerous Indian swiftlets and amongst them were some white-rumped spinetails and one wire-tailed swallow. Those latter two were the third and fourth "new" birds for the day (the first had been a crimson-backed sunbird).

So despite the sanctuary being closed the morning had turned out better than expected, with the jungle striped squirrel and four new birds. I waited for a bus beside the checkpoint. Some bonnet macaques were jumping in a nearby tree, and then a larger monkey jumped from there into a larger tree. That had to be a langur. I hurried over, and found two black-footed grey langurs waaaaay up high, maybe sixty feet up. As usual, I could see them fine with the binoculars but trying to take photos looking up at them against the light through all the leaves and branches was pretty futile. They were very nice though, and did look quite different from the tufted grey langurs.

---