Fishing cats (Prionailurus viverrinus), India’s only wetland specialist felid, is found across south and southeast Asian low-lying wetlands. In India, they make their homes in alluvial floodplains and coastal deltas, in marshes and mangroves.
At a time when the fishing cat has been losing its last refuge, we studied how it was still persisting in an administrative block in the lower Gangetic floodplains in West Bengal: Amta, in Howrah district.
As you enter the low-lying areas of Howrah, your eyes become acclimatised to stretches of marshy reeds on both sides of the National Highway. When you enter Amta, you see tall blades of grass covering a surface of sticky mud. This is where the fishing cat lives and breeds. And the world of long green blades you’ve have walked into is called khori bon, a kind of cultivated marsh.
According to Ratan Maity, who has lived in the area for many years, “Amta was once covered by byana (a type of soft-stemmed reed). During the British reign, the erstwhile zamindar made the villagers clear the byana and redistributed the land to them for agriculture. In return, the villagers had to pay revenue to the zamindar.”
The area experienced seasonal inundation every year during the monsoon. As a result, khori (wetland-grassland) cultivation was introduced and flourished here where most other crops had failed. This the plant that now covers Amta and shelters the fishing cat. Although byana is still present in pockets, the majority of the vegetation was replaced by khori.
The more water there was, the better the khori grew, thanks to nutrients in the water; its cultivators didn’t use fertilisers. However, the Damodar Valley Corporation (DVC), formed in 1948 to moderate floods, provide irrigation and generate electricity, chose Amta to drain excess floodwater during the monsoon, so the place now has canals and lock gates all around.
Hajir Syed Waris Ali, a khori dealer, said, “Now we need extra labour to clear the undergrowth in khori bon, which once died on its own as result of floods.”
Today, even khori cultivation requires that fertilisers be applied. And when they wash off into nearby canals and ponds, they promote the presence of algal blooms and hyacinth beds. Local people have reported seeing fewer birds than usual, especially during winter. Bivalve molluscs, frogs, turtles and native freshwater fishes have also dwindled. What happened to the fishing cat?
Helping local farmers
Earlier, Amta’s ponds were flush with wild fish, and the area’s inhabitants didn’t have to bother owning the water bodies or practising pisciculture because there was always enough catch. When the Damodar or the Rupnarayan rivers flooded, native freshwater fish would rush into the ponds, such as pod koi (Badis badis), kholshe (Colisa lalius) and nadosh (Nadus nadus). However, these species are difficult to find today.
Pisciculture had come with ownership and ownership with maximisation of profit. More profit meant pressing more wetlands into the service of intensive aquaculture and killing naturally occurring carnivorous fish like shal (Channa marulius) and shol (Channa striatus), which prey on cultivated fish. Their place has been taken up by carps and, according to local fisherfolk, the fishing cat hunts grass carp and silver carp.
They say this cat “looks like a tiger but walks like a leopard”. Most of them can sense the cat’s presence by the peculiar smell of fish scales. They imitate the cough/bark-like sound the cat makes when they’re narrating stories about the way it catches fish.
The cat sits by bending its front legs and stretching the rear limbs on the bank of the pond, and watches the water’s surface in rapt attention, not so much as twitching when a passerby flashes a torchlight in its eyes. It prefers to hunt at night, when lack of oxygen in the water causes its denizens to swim closer to the surface.
According to the fisherfolk, the cat preys on fish that feed and live in the epilimnion – top layer – of a shallow freshwater body, including the grass carp, American rui, etc. The fishing cat prefers big and fleshy fish but doesn’t eat the whole body; fishermen have reported seeing a head, pieces of the backbone and egg sacs of a pregnant fish left behind in thickets nearby.
When the Fishing Cat Project team asked fisherman about the number of fish they’d lost to the fishing cat, the answer seemed unbelievable – 15 kg, one said.
The number of fishes reportedly taken by fishing cats varied greatly and were often exaggerated. A fisherman from Tajpur told us that only 20 of the 350 grass carps he’d kept in a pond had survived after two months. “I am certain that the fishing cat is the culprit because I had applied some medicines in the water to prevent otters from stealing the fish,” he said.
The camera traps we’d installed by the ponds revealed a more mundane truth: in the dead of night, we saw some people dragging their fishing nets through the water. Sometimes a hand would reach down to the camera and turn it away to keep from registering their faces. One trap had been removed, its SD card taken out and the trap then put back.
Villagers in the area also accuse the fishing cat of having taken away their goats and chicken. And the moment one of them spots a member of the Fishing Cat Project, they launch into a litany of complaints against the thieving cat.
A local NGO, the Sarada Prasad Tirtha Janakalyan Samiti, launched a community-owned and managed seed goat fund last year. The deal is that economically backward families would be given pregnant goats under the condition that the kids born will be taken away to join a goat bank. The goats from the bank will then be available to replace goats taken by fishing cats (after reporting and investigation).
Almost a year since, local people have reported only two killings in the 18 villages the NGO covers, from Mirpara and Kazipur, both small hamlets surrounded by khori.
Impending endangerment
The villagers can’t kill the cat; as a schedule I species, killing a fishing cat is a punishable offence, and the local police and officials from the forest department get involved. And before it was classified as a schedule I species and the conservation campaigns had made inroads, local people used to kill the cat not just in retaliation but also as a display of bravery. However, the biggest anthropogenic threat to the fishing cat hasn’t been guns or knives but habitat loss.
Tracts designated ‘wasteland’ are easy targets for land sharks and those pushing ‘development’. As a result, the fishing cat is on the cusp of losing its last remaining natural refuge.
However, the DVC’s activities in the area have resulted in ‘competition’ against the cultivation of khori, in favour of hardwood trees and other cash crops. Though they’re less intense, floods still occur every monsoon and the waters break through the bandhs at different places. In 2017, many parts of Amta were flooded and acres of cultivated paddy and jute were left to rot. Such occurrences have kept the people of Amta from shifting away from khori cultivation entirely, even though the market for it has been on the wane.
Khori is chiefly used in betel leaf cultivation, where different grades of khori are used to build sheltered spaces within which the betel leaves can be grown and kept cool. However, just like with khori, the market for Bangla pan – a variety of betel leaf – has also fallen.
As a result, the betel leaf cultivators of Amta are facing a crisis. They have either stopped cultivating betel leaves or they plan to soon. In the market, 1,000 betel leaves sell for Rs 100 whereas farmers need Rs 300-400 for the same quantity. The export of betel leaf to Bangladesh has also stopped.
Khori from Amta is also sold in parts of South 24 Pargana and Pashchim Medinipur district for the cultivation of mithe pan, another variety of betel leaf that has been faring better than its more pungent cousin. However, mithe paan cultivation in these parts has been threatened by a proposed extension of the industrial belt of Haldia.
All these factors together determine the future of the cultivated marshlands of Amta, where the fishing cat lives – and right now, it looks bleak. Community-based conservation will only marginally postpone the fishing cat’s endangerment as bigger economic, political and social factors distort the balance.
Priyanka Das is a graduate of Christ University, and is passionate about environmental conservation. She was a student researcher at The Fishing Cat Project.