Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law

by Mary Roach

Elephants! Naha assures me they’re not far off. It’s winter, the time of year when herds are on the move. They forage at night and sleep by day in patches of teak and lal—remnants of the forests that once stretched from the Indian state of Assam through North Bengal all the way to the eastern border of Nepal. This “elephant corridor” has since been fractured and diminished, first by the many sprawling tea estates planted by the British and more recently by military bases and settlements of refugees and immigrants from Nepal and Bangladesh. Ever more humans are coming into these forests to cut wood and graze their livestock, turning elephant habitat into human. In their attempts to cross the land, the elephants encounter barriers, dangers, dead ends. The corridor is now a pinball game. Herds can become isolated in a single pocket of forest. They become “pocketed elephants.” Keeping elephants in a pocket is as ill-advised as it sounds. The gene pool stagnates and the population density spikes. Soon there’s not enough food to support them. They wander into villages to eat what they can find, and what they find is people’s crops and granaries.