Shendurney Wildlife Sanctuary

The story of Shendurney Wildlife Sanctuary

Shendurney is the wild half of Thenmala, and the half almost nobody actually enters. It lies east of the town, an unbroken mosaic of tropical evergreen and semi-evergreen cover, and at its centre is the Parappar reservoir — about 18.7 square kilometres of the sanctuary under water, roughly a ninth of it. Drifting across that water by boat, a green wall rising on both sides, is what most visitors carry away.

The sanctuary's own origin explains its shape. The Forest Department's management plan states it plainly: the boundary roughly coincides with the watershed boundary of the Kallada reservoir, an important source of irrigation water for Kollam and Pathanamthitta. Shendurney is, in origin, a catchment given legal protection — which is why the far shore of the reservoir has no buildings on it and never will.

It takes its name from the chenkurinji tree, Gluta travancorica, whose Malayalam name was anglicised. One correction while we are here, because tourism copy runs hard the other way: chenkurinji does not grow only in Shendurney. It is endemic to the Agasthyamala landscape south of the Aryankavu Gap, and occurs in Peppara and Neyyar and over the border in Kalakad-Mundanthurai. The Forest Department's own plan calls it a tree confined to this tract, and that is an overstatement in a primary document. IUCN lists it as Near Threatened.

The biodiversity is real and the numbers are better than the round ones usually printed. The management plan records 1,256 species of flowering plants, of which around 309 — about a quarter, not the 'large share' usually claimed — are Western Ghats endemics. It records 268 birds, 35 mammals, 36 reptiles, 29 amphibians, 42 fishes and 257 butterflies including 25 Western Ghats endemics, which it calls one of the richest butterfly areas in the whole of the Ghats. Elephant and tiger are both listed by the plan as globally threatened species present here — our old line that tiger only rarely passes through the deeper reaches was an unsourced hedge in the opposite direction from the primary document.

We also owe a correction on a bird. A distinctive nightjar is said to have been first documented in these hills, which reads as a species first described from here. It is not true. What actually happened is more specific and more checkable: a brood of the Great Eared Nightjar was found during the sanctuary's annual bird survey — the first record of the bird in Kollam district, the previous southern record being from the Siruvani foothills in Tamil Nadu in May 1995. The subspecies is bourdilloni, named for T. F. Bourdillon of the Travancore forest service, whose name is also on two of the sanctuary's signature endemic trees.

And a correction we should have made long ago. Older material on this page said the Kani people have long lived in and around these hills and that their knowledge is woven into the sanctuary's story. The Forest Department's management plan enumerates every human settlement inside the boundary, and they are all private estates — Rosemala, Kallar and part of Rockwood. No Kani or Kanikkar settlement is recorded anywhere inside Shendurney. The Kani are genuinely associated with the Peppara, Neyyar and Agasthyakoodam country in Thiruvananthapuram district; we had borrowed a community from a neighbouring landscape, which is a thing tourism writing does constantly and should not.

What is inside is 877 hectares of private estate. Rosemala alone has 225 families and about 1,266 people on 262 hectares; Kallar has twice the land and 22 families; Rockwood, two. The department writes, in its own published plan, that the presence of the estates is hindering effective management and that efforts should be directed towards their effective rehabilitation. That plan ran to 2021–22. Nobody has been moved.

Deeper in, the sanctuary is still being described. Two jumping spiders new to science, both in the genus Epidelaxia, were published from Shendurney in February 2025 — the first record of that genus in India, previously thought endemic to Sri Lanka. And there are 20 hectares of Myristica swamp here, in six mapped fragments totalling about a tenth of one per cent of the sanctuary: relict freshwater swamp woodland, among the rarest habitats in the Western Ghats.

For all that, Shendurney stays under-visited, and it is genuinely hard to get into — which is the point of it. A boat at dawn, a walk under very tall trees, and the knowledge that what you are looking at is a water supply that grew a sanctuary around itself.

Legend & myth

The document that legally created Shendurney describes a boundary and then, on the same page, states an extent that the boundary cannot possibly enclose. Forty-two years later nobody has corrected it.

The notification is G.O.(P) No. 258/84/AD, S.R.O. No. 1166/84, dated 25 August 1984, signed by the Agricultural Production Commissioner by order of the Governor. Its schedule gives the extent of the area as 10,032 hectares — that is 100.32 square kilometres. Its boundary description runs from Thenmala east along a ridge to Periyamaruthimalai, down the state boundary to Karimala, back along the division's southern edge to the Kallada reservoir and along the reservoir's southern shore to the dam site, then between the dam and the Thenmala forest office.

We measured what that describes. The sanctuary boundary as mapped in OpenStreetMap is a single closed ring of 948 nodes, and it encloses about 173.7 square kilometres. So the boundary is a 172-ish sanctuary and the extent figure on the same page is a 100-ish one, and the gap is about 71 square kilometres — seventy per cent of the sanctuary as declared, an area larger than Kollam city.

Everything downstream inherited the larger number, which is the one that matches the ground. The Forest Department's own management plan says 171 sq km. Its website says 171. Kerala Tourism, the same government, says approximately 172. Wikipedia says 172.403. Wikidata says 17,100 hectares. Three arms of one state government publish three different figures, and the one signed by order of the Governor is the outlier.

The management plan is internally consistent about 171, which is the strongest evidence for it. Its zonation adds up: core 75.5 sq km at nearly 44 per cent, buffer 47.13 at 27.6 per cent, tourism zone 48.35 at 28.2 per cent — a total of 170.98, and 99.8 per cent. Its two sections are sized 90 and 81 sq km, which is 171 again. The department manages, zones, patrols and staffs a 171 sq km sanctuary. The 100.32 figure survives in exactly one place: the legal instrument that created it.

This is the same shape as the Ramsar sheet error on Ashtamudi at the other end of this district — a summary figure contradicted by the body of the same document, then copied downstream by everyone who read only the summary. The extent is often called disputed, with different figures said to describe a core and a wider unit. That guess was wrong, and we can now say what actually happened.

The same plan has a second error worth checking yourself. It states that the sanctuary lies between 8°44′ and 9°14′ north and 76°59′ and 77°16′ east. The mapped boundary runs 8°48.5′–8°58.1′ N and 77°03.8′–77°15.8′ E. The eastern longitude is right; the western is about 9 km out, the southern about 8 km out, and the northern limit is stated nearly 16 arc-minutes — some 29 km — too far north, up past Punalur and well outside any ground the sanctuary contains. The box as printed is about 55 by 31 kilometres, roughly 1,730 sq km: ten times the area the same page claims two paragraphs later, and impossible beside its own statement that the sanctuary is about 25 km long east to west.

Two smaller bones from the same skeleton. Wikipedia and Wikidata both give shendurney.com as the sanctuary's official website; the domain is parked and now redirects to a domain broker, so anyone following the citation lands on a for-sale page. And the species counts drift as they are recopied: the plan says 1,256 plants and 268 birds, Wikipedia says 1,257 and 267, and the plan itself gives butterflies as both 257 and 263 in different places. Nobody is recounting. They are retyping.

The other confusion is the consequential one for your day, and we keep it: Shendurney and Thenmala eco-tourism are not the same thing. The eco-tourism zones are a ticketed attraction with made trails and handrails. The sanctuary is entered under Forest Department permission arranged in person at the section office. You cannot buy your way into the second at the counter for the first.

And Rosemala is both a viewpoint and a village, which is where the confusion comes from. It is a valley settlement of 225 families reached by a rough forest road through elephant country — and there is also a ticketed Forest Department lookout at the top, ₹83 a head, with parking and a counter. What needs permission and a guide is the walking beyond the settlement, not the drive.