MORE PICTURES FROM INDIA (Captions by Richard Freeman)

Pintu, one of our guides, who found a mysterious bone in Siju caves

Me in Siju cave, looking for bones

Chris, Adam and I outside of Siju Cave, where a village headman reported an encounter with a mande-barung



Chris and Dave on an old-fashioned jungle suspension bridge, minus Johnny Weissmuller

The beautiful Simsang River where the sankuni, a huge mystery snake, has been reported.

INDIA EXPEDITION: First Video Report

For the next week we shall be posting pictures and a brief video from the India expedition.

FIRST PICTURES FROM INDIA (Captions by Richard Freeman)

A few weeks prior to our arrival the jungle was filled with elephants passing through the area.

Each morning we heard the hoolock gibbons calling from deep in the forest.

This is a tourist lodge in the jungle at Nokrek. It is made to look like a traditional Garo house.

One night, or so our guide Rudy said, a tiger was prowling around it, attracted by the live chickens.

Sadly we didn't see hide nor hair of it!

We sampled a local wild fruit that the guides called 'tescun.'

It was quite delicious but also quite unlike anything I have tasted before.

Describing the flavour would be akin to trying to describe a new colour never seen before!

One of our first ports of call was Nokrek National Park.

There have been several recent mande-barung sightings here.

We set up several camera traps baited with fruit and left

them in the hope that the creature would be attracted.

We bought fresh produce from village markets; produce such as

fruit, rice, vegetables, eggs and live chickens, all of whom I named!
The food prepared by our guides in the jungle lodges
was far better than the fare we endured in Tura.

THE BOYS ARE BACK IN TOWN

The Indian Expedition is back in the UK. Richard rang me a few moments ago.

Of course, the most important thing that I wanted to find out was how Chris Clark is. The answer is thankfully pretty good. He was treated in India, and managed to do most of the stuff that the other expedition members did.

The expedition appears to have been remarkably succesful. They have interviewed a number of mande burung eyewitnesses, photographed what appear to be footprints, and have obtained samples. One of these is a fragment of bone from a femur of what appears to be a bipedal creature, but until we have test results I would caution against getting one's hopes up.

They also have evidence for two other cryptozoological creatures. Richard gave me brief details, but he will be coming up here next week, and I will post further details then.

In the meantime it is just good to know that once again they have returned safe and sound.

OLL LEWIS: The Disappearing Western Hoolock

As you will have seen from some of the previous articles I've written for this blog the Garo Hills is home to a large number of rare species. One of those species, and indeed a species that some people have postulated may be responsible for some sightings of the Indian Yeti, is the western hoolock gibbon (Hoolock hoolock). The western hoolock is an endangered species of tail-less gibbon and can grow to a maximum size of around 90cm, making it, in terms of size of individuals, the second largest known species of gibbon in the world.

The western hoolock is under considerable pressure from several different sources, including deforestation and hunting, and as a result the population has declined by 50% in the last 40 years. Unless conservation efforts pay off this trend is likely to continue. As the population becomes more fragmented the speed of decline will only accelerate as groups of the gibbons become more and more isolated from each other. This isolation of groups will lead to smaller local gene-pools and the inevitable loss of potential genetic combinations that could reduce resistance to disease and other environmental pressures, and if this isolation is caused by deforestation and the fragmentation of habitat then, if one local group is wiped out it is less likely that the area will be recolonised naturally. There are estimated to be less than 5000 individual western hoolock gibbons across their entire range in Bangladesh, North Eastern India and North Western Myanmar. It is also thought to occur in parts of the Tibet area of China, and it has been listed among the worlds 25 most at risk primates by the IUCN.

Another potential threat to the western hoolock's survival is its close relative the eastern hoolock gibbon (Hoolock leuconedys), which is also a threatened species but classed as vulnerable rather than the more threatened endangered western hoolock. Typically the eastern hoolock is only found to the east of the Chindwin River but the two species are not reproductively isolated and hybridisation between the two species occurs towards the river's source. It is known that there is a population of the eastern hoolock, within the range of the western hoolock, in Arunachal Pradesh and it is certainly a possibility that hybridisation will have occurred around the edges of this population as well. Isolated hybridisation is one thing but if the eastern hoolock encroaches further into the western hoolocks territory there is a danger that hybridisation could spread, which would further impact the population of western hoolocks.

It is certainly not too late to save the western hoolock and along with a CITES listing there are several habitat conservation projects in India from which the western hoolock benefits, but in order to halt the decline of the species and even reverse that trend a lot more will have to be done.

OLL LEWIS: The Ancient Sea-monsters of India

Monsters and strange animals have, like in many places around the world, been reported in and around India for thousands of years. A particular type of sea monster, known in the west as Ketea Indikoi (literally 'Indian sea-monsters'), was reported to inhabit the Indian Ocean near Sri Lanka. The monsters supposedly could be encountered in a variety of forms, usually with the head of one animal and the body of a fish. The animals' heads were often said to be mammalian ones ranging from lions to rams, but as well as these there were claims that some even had the heads of women with spines instead of hair. The creatures are also said to have been able to live on land as well as in the oceans.

The animals, if they existed at all, were likely just the result of travellers distorting descriptions of perfectly normal animals found in the area, like large crocodiles. The most well known description of these creatures dates back to the second century AD in the part fable, part natural history work, De Natura Animalium (On the nature of animals) by Claudius Aelianus, which is based on reports that would have passed through many different people before reaching his ears.

'Those [Indians of Taprobane--\ modern day Sri Lanka] that live near to the sea . . . devote themselves to catching fish and sea-monsters (ketoi). For they assert that the sea which surrounds the circuit of their island breeds a multitude past numbering of fishes and monsters, and moreover that they have the heads of lions and leopards and wolves and rams, and, still more wonderful to relate, that there are some which have the forms of Satyroi with the faces of women, and these have spines attached in place of hair. They tell of others too which have strange forms whose appearance not even men skilled in painting and in combining bodies of diverse shapes to make one marvel at the sight, could portray with accuracy or represent for all of their artistic skill; for these creatures have immense and coiling tails, while for feet they have claws or fins. I learn too that they are amphibious and that at night they graze the fields, for they eat the grass as cattle and rooks do; they enjoy the ripe fruit of the date-palm and therefore shake the trees with their coils, which being supple and capable of embracing, they fling round them. So when the shower of dates has fallen because of this violent shaking, they feed upon it. And then as the night wanes and before it is clear daylight these creatures plunge into the ocean and disappear as the dawn begins to glow.'

Make of that what you will....

OLL LEWIS: Take me to the River

One afternoon in February 1973 a priest out for an afternoon walk by the Kuano river near the village of Baragdava, Uttar Pradesh in Northern India, saw a most peculiar sight. The priest was crossing the river via a dam when he saw a naked boy of about 15 years old walking into the water and diving under the waters for about a minute before rising up triumphantly with a fish in his mouth. The lad ate the fish raw then swam away. When the priest told the villagers of this unusual sight a woman named Somni told him how her son Ramchandra was swept away by the river when he was a baby and would be roughly the same age as the boy.

Although another villager saw the boy by the river a few days later the boy was not seen again in the area until 1978 when Somni spotted him in a field. Somni was able to look at a birthmark on the boy and confirmed it was her missing son before he ran off. This time the villagers were more prepared and managed to find and capture the boy to take him back to Baragdava. He eventually escaped again and went back to living in the river but having learned that humans would feed him and meant him no harm, he was no longer afraid of human contact.

Ramchandra would occasionally come to the village or regularly be spotted by the river and seemed quite happy with his lot in life. It was on one of his visits into the village that the boy was observed by a journalist who wrote up the story of the feral child (who was by now a man) for the Allahabad magazine and observed Ramchandra submerging himself underwater for much longer than a normal person would be capable of. The journalist said that Ramchandra had dark skin with a subtle green tinge to it and walked upright but with a quite clumsy gait. He also had very hard skin on his feet as one might expect from someone who spent their life outdoors and without the comfort of shoes. It is thought that the boy was deaf and certainly was never observed speaking or making any human sounds.

Compared to most feral children it would seem that Ramchandra led quite a nice life and it doesn't look like he was ever persecuted, abused or exploited in order to make money or make somebody famous, as is the fate of most feral children. His death, however, was tragic. He had made his way into the nearby village of Sanrigar where a woman threw a large amount of boiling water at him in fright. The woman, unaware that this was the river boy from the next village along, had possibly been frightened by Ramchandra's appearance, strange walk and the fact that he would have been completely naked; and she may have feared that she was about to be sexually attacked by a madman. Ramchandra ran back to the river that he knew and loved but it was too late for the young fish lad and his blistered body was found in the river later that day.