Trees planted: 50 numbers
Date: 20-July-2008
This is one of the dream projects since inception in February 2008, which is slightly different from other projects.Kaggaladu is small village with 25 houses, near Sira taluk, on the way to Changapura. Main occupation and the source of income is agriculture for the people depending on rain. Although the village has interconnected 2 lakes for serving the purpose, the lakes rarely fills up.But the main point of attraction is this is a bird sanctuary. Variety of species of birds like Painted storks, Black ibis, Spot billed pelicans, Grey herons, Pelicans, Baya weaver and many more are main habitats in this area, apart from sparrows and crows. These birds are migrating and come from different places of the world. These birds visit this village from January and lay eggs, and feed their young ones, help to grow and in the month of June July they start their next destination. Amazingly birds wish to live on tamarind trees, as this can support lot of weight and easy to build nest due to tamarind tree structure. Most of the tamarind trees are within the village. The main food for these birds is fish from the nearby lakes.KFD, Karnataka Forest Department has identified this as a bird sanctuary, but hardly you will get information. Even you don’t find a sign post to reach Kaggaladu, unless you ask by-passers. Couples of years back, KFD official were available at this village to help these birds by feeding fish, but this is diminishing. But these birds are part of daily life of the villagers and villagers are very interested to see more bird arriving. A primary school welcomes you to the village.We visited this place for the feasibility of tree plantations, identifying planting location and met village leaders for their support for our project. This happened in 16-June-2008. Remember, local support is very important.On 20-july-2008, we started from Bangalore with 60 saplings and 6 volunteers to Kaggaladu. We reached the village around 1030 hours. First thing we met village leaders for their support and discussed our idea and. We met Jnansindu, HK Raju and Shankarappa who are the village panchayath members. Later we received acceptable support from the local people. Digging tools were borrowed and we planted approximately 10 numbers of jack fruit saplings in the school premises mainly for the shade. This was done to promote other variety of tree to grow which requires minimum supervision. Later we planted remaining 45 saplings of tamarind across various places in the village. Children were more interested than elders. (Young buds proved they don’t think commercially) we finished all the plantings. These trees need deeper pit, as the roots should be firmly holding earth. Surprisingly villagers wanted more saplings to plant at their premises; it is good to see someone is willing to come forward to plant a tree. By this time, work was completely managed by kids! We provided fence with the Jaali trees.During planting time, a person objected to plant a sapling, digging deep the matter, he disclosed the place belongs to him and he want to chop off a existing tamarind tree, were birds are nesting. We all gathered to convince him and to alter his house building plans. Also KFD is providing money per year for the landlord, if the nesting tree belongs in his private land. We put all efforts to convince him. We wish to see the tree during our next visit. Also Levin provided very good advice to villagers on cost saving building house techniques, how to prepare best manure within village…and so on.By this time, we were exhausted; we finished our parcel plate Idlis and started by 1530hours. At the end of the day we had a satisfaction that, we did something better.Volunteers; Harsha, Levin, Albert, Retish, Balasubramaniam, Sharavan (RNSIT)
http://picasaweb.google.co.in/life.trust.blr/Kaggaladu#
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