Shieldtails - an unfulfilled dream

 In the late 1990s, I bought a small Malayalam book about snakes. It wasn't good, consisting mostly of myths and misinformation, but towards the end of it, there was a section about groups of snakes found in India. In there, was a paragraph about a group of snakes called Shield-tailed Snakes (കവചവാലൻ പാമ്പുകൾ!). Immediately, my mind created an image of a secretive snake holding a shield up with it's tail.

Little did I know, that I had already come across these snakes. My father used to work in a hydel power station near Munnar, Kerala, and I spent some of my childhood days up there. We used to see these small, colourful snakes dead on the road frequently. Sometimes, our cats used to bring them into the house. For my parents, these were always 'baby kraits' and had to be disposed off immediately.

The mountains of Munnar, a mix of plantations, forests, and grasslands.

A few years later, (in the year 2000, I think) I managed to get my hands on a copy of Fauna of British India, vol. 3, by Malcom A. Smith. The book had some line drawings of the heads and tails of a few shieldtails but no photos. I came across an article in one of the old issues of the science magazine 'Resonance' in my college library, on "Secrets of the Shieldtails" (Kartik Shanker, 1996). It had some paintings and specimen photographs, but also much information on their habitats, the mountain forests of the Western Ghats. Around the same time, I also got a new edition of The Book of Indian Reptiles and Amphibians by J. C. Daniel. No photos of shieldtails there either, but there were beautiful paintings of other snakes, originally published by Frank Wall in the early 20th century. There was a single 'internet cafe' (remember those?) in my place. I went there to search for pictures: the only ones I found were a couple of photos of Bombay Shieldtails (Uropeltis macrolepis), by some person, who I imagined to be an army man, named Ashok Captain. Bored with my college studies, I decided to try my hand at illustrating some shieldtails, with a combination of Smith's description and my imagination of the colours. The results were spectacularly unimpressive, but for me back then, that was the closest I could get to visualizing the beauty of these snakes.

 

The tail 'shield' of a Kerala shieldtail (U. cf. ceylanica).
Not what I imagined as a kid, but probably much better.

 

Fast forward a couple of years, and Dr. Kartik Vasudevan at Wildlife Institute of India was asking me what my interests are during our efforts to figure out a Master's Thesis subject for me. "I want to study shieldtails". He laughed, because I had about three months in peak summer for the thesis. I ended up studying breeding behaviour of wild peafowl in Rajaji National Park.

 

A rather large and stout shieldtail from Parambikulam.

 

After my M. Sc., I traveled around the Anamalais for a few weeks. This time, it was actually for finding shieldtails, for a project that Kartik was conducting. Knowing almost nothing about their biology and ecology, I was doing all the wrong things. I would go to a place by bus, and starting walking around, often in torrential rains. Wherever it looked like there was a log or rock to move, I did that. If there was a hill to climb, I climbed it. Had my life flash in front of me when lightning struck a roadside pole a few meters in front of me on a rainy day in Vagamon. I found very few animals like this. But there was one experience that I will never forget.

 

The head and tail of an Ocellated Shieldtail (Uropeltis cf. ocellata).
I use the 'cf.' in the name because rarely have I come across a shieldtail that
perfectly matched the description in publications.

 2006 was the year of mass blooming of Neelakkurinji (Strobilanthes kunthiana). A small bushy plant from the higher elevations of Western Ghats that turns the shola-grasslands purple once every twelve years, it attracts massive crowd of tourists to Munnar, a hill station in Kerala. That year, Eravikulam National Park had record breaking number of visitors (more than 5 lakh). I was walking along a road passing through a mix of cardamom plantations and patches of forests, looking for snakes along the edges. Lines of vehicles were passing me by in both directions. Many had Kurinji flowers in the rear window and some were waving the flowers out of the side windows. Probably taking them home to plant in their gardens. I walked about two kilometers only, and found 27 shieldtails dead on the road, not to mention other several other species of snakes.

Neelakkurinji (Strobilanthes kunthiana) flowering in the high elevation shola-grasslands
of the Anamalais in 2006.

A road-killed shieldtail. This is a recent photo and not from that 2006 experience. Most roadkills
are usually much more damaged, except for the shield part of the tail.

A couple of small projects later, I started working on a project proposal to study shieldtails. However, back then, I had no impulse control and when B. C. Choudhary asked me if I wanted to study herpetofauna in the Nicobar Islands, I jumped at the chance. I spent most of the following six years in islands far from my beloved shieldtails. A couple more years to finish my thesis. By now, shieldtails photos were plenty on the internet, new species had been discovered, existing species split up, and names changed. Vivek Cyriac was even doing this PhD work on shieldtails, much to my envy. 

That's the story of an unfulfilled dream. But I tell myself, it's fine. Someday, I will get to see them all.

Yours truly in 2006, hoping to find shieldtails.