Haven’t had a long break for ages so the trip to Koyna Wildlife Sanctuary, about 200 km South of here, was very welcome. It’s a lovely green place and I thoroughly enjoyed camping there but for one thing. The tree cover, in many areas, comprises exotic species like Eucalyptus and even (horrors!) Casuarina. Most of them are of considerable maturity so they must have been planted en masse when the dam was constructed in the early 1960s.

Koyna reservoir is infamous for being built directly over a fault line and for the devastating dam-induced earthquake in 1967. Wildlife was either sparsely distributed or very shy because we hardly saw anything. There were some birds and a fair number of butterflies but not nearly as many as there should be in a place like this.

I’m not one of those people who thinks a trip to the wilderness is incomplete without sighting a large mammal – I tend to look at the diversity of smaller creatures to gauge the health of an ecosystem; and in this respect, Koyna is found wanting.