Eravikulam National Park: How the Nilgiri Tahr Found a Stronghold

High above the tea gardens of Munnar, where the air thins and the clouds seem to graze the hilltops, a stocky mountain goat with curved horns picks its way across a wall of rock. This is the Nilgiri tahr — an animal that once teetered toward extinction, and that today owes much of its survival to a single stretch of rolling upland grassland called Eravikulam. The park is not just a place to watch wildlife; it is a story of how a colonial hunting ground was turned, against the odds, into the endangered tahr's last great stronghold.

An animal on the brink

The Nilgiri tahr (Nilgiritragus hylocrius) is found nowhere else on Earth but the high ranges of the southern Western Ghats. Sure-footed and thickset, the males — known locally as ‘saddlebacks’ for the pale grey patch that develops on their backs — cling to near-vertical cliffs where few predators can follow. By the twentieth century, hunting and shrinking habitat had pushed the species to alarmingly low numbers across its range. Eravikulam, with its unbroken sweep of montane grassland, held one of the few substantial herds left.

Today the park is home to an estimated 750 to 800 Nilgiri tahr (indicative — confirm locally), thought to be the single largest surviving wild population and the highest density anywhere. Along the Rajamala slopes the animals have grown so used to visitors that they graze within a few metres of the path — a rare intimacy with a species classed as endangered on the IUCN Red List.

From game reserve to national park

Eravikulam’s protection did not come all at once. In the colonial era the high plateau around Anamudi was managed as a private game reserve by the planters of the Kannan Devan Hills, and hunting was a gentleman’s pursuit. A shift began in 1936, when the Rajamala area was set aside as a sanctuary and shooting was brought under tighter control. After the Kerala government resumed the hill lands in the early 1970s, the region was declared the Eravikulam–Rajamala Wildlife Sanctuary in 1975, expressly to safeguard the tahr and its habitat.

The decisive step came on 19 May 1978, when the area was elevated to become Eravikulam National Park — Kerala’s very first national park (indicative — confirm locally). What had once been a place to shoot the tahr had, in a single generation, become the place most responsible for saving it.

The shola-grassland: a landscape made for tahr

What makes Eravikulam so vital is not just protection on paper but the landscape itself. The park is a classic shola-grassland mosaic: open, wind-combed grasslands rolling over the ridges, stitched together by dense pockets of stunted evergreen ‘shola’ forest tucked into the folds and valleys. The grasslands feed the grazing tahr; the sholas act as sponges, soaking up the monsoon and releasing it slowly into the streams that run down to the plains. It is an ancient, self-sustaining system found only at these high elevations in the Western Ghats.

Rising out of this mosaic is Anamudi, the ‘elephant’s forehead’, at roughly 2,695 metres the highest mountain in India south of the Himalaya. Its upper slopes are prime tahr country, and the peak lends the whole park an alpine grandeur unusual for the tropics.

One park in a much larger wild

Eravikulam does not stand alone. It sits at the heart of one of the largest protected landscapes in the Western Ghats, linked with neighbours such as Chinnar Wildlife Sanctuary, Anamudi Shola and Pampadum Shola National Parks, the Kurinjimala Sanctuary and, across the state line, the Anamalai Tiger Reserve. Together they give the tahr, and the elephants, gaur and elusive predators that share these hills, room to roam beyond any single boundary — the kind of connected habitat that gives a threatened species a genuine future.

That is the quiet triumph of Eravikulam. A place designed for the pleasure of hunters became, through decades of patient reclassification and care, the beating heart of Nilgiri tahr conservation. When you watch a saddleback nose along the Rajamala grass, you are looking at the outcome of that long change of heart.