Shola forests and black wattle of Avalanche

Aradu kuttan

We (Me and Kuttannan) went to Avalanche in November for a short filming. Avalanche named after an `avalanche’- a landslide, in 1823. We stayed in a Avalanche mund (toda village). It was a nice stay every morning I saw Nilgiri laughing thrushes coming through bushes and laughed at me (they came very close that I could not film them!). Grasses were carrying water droplets, waiting just to be absorbed by sun.
Our friends have got lots of buffalos, the famous and scared, toda buffalos. Every day I saw buffalos leaving mund by 06.30 hrs to graze in the hill slopes, and they came back themselves by evening. Evening sunlight filtering through buffalos' white (toda buffalos are not black) crest hair was a different view of sunset for me. Toda houses' roof was thatched with grass (I ve posted one photo of a toda temple in one of the previous posts). Relationship with forest is starts when a child is born, it follows in marriage and death in toda.

Black wattle in flowering 

One of the elders in the village mantioned that Avalanche was full of shola trees, rhododendrons, orchids, epiphytes and small wetlands. Rattan, a plant group belongs to palm was abundent in the near by sholas, which they used to construct temples. But now due to the invasion of Black wattle they have to go to the distant forests.

Black wattle

Black wattle Acacia mearnsii (a fast-growing leguminous tree native to Australia) had reached almost everywhere. Kuttan is a nursery expert and he says that the germination rate of Black. The invasiveness of this tree species is due to its ability to produce large numbers of long-lived seeds and the development of a large crown which shades other vegetation. Acacia mearnsii competes with and replaces most of the indigenous vegetation.