Article Credit: www.smartoffice.com/tiger/index.htm
A site promoting this magnificent place of shifting soils,
waters, forests, diverse animal life, and people struggling to
survive under nature's relentless demands.
Travels of the Heart:
SUNDARBANS
- Bengal Tiger Preserve
The Sundarbans "beautiful forest" delta is one of
the world's most unique regions. Measuring over 10,000 square kilometers,
this mangrove ecosystem - the world's largest - stretches across
coastal India and Bangladesh, over the northern part of the Bay
of Bengal.
In this place, the land glistens. The tide comes in twice daily
covering much of the place, deepening old channels, cutting new
ones, soils forever shifting. Maps of the Sundarbans never accurately
reflect it in its constant metamorphosis, shapes shifting from
one expression of soils and waters to another and, yet, another
in a constant, re-emergent sculpture of place.
The Sundarbans exhibits a sort of occasional ferocity that is
rarely seen in other places. Cyclones have torn through this area...responsible
for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people whose dead bodies
litter the numerous shores and channels... This is also the land
of the man-eater, the last vestiges of the Bengal tiger. It is
a place [colored] by myth and torn apart by history - for tiger
pelts, crocodile skins, and deforestation - at the hands of Mogul
and British colonizers, who preferred farming over fishing and
control over the wild.
In this brackish land, people own little and often make their
living on the water,...men and women fishing when the season is
right. At other times, the men collect firewood or honey deep within
the forests. Those who live around the protected forest areas have
built high embankments around their villages to prevent the flooding
[by] storms and daily tides.
Discover this unusual swamp that is home to hundreds of animal
and fish species, annual cyclones, some of the world's largest
and rarest estuarine crocodiles, and tigers that have a taste for
human blood.
The Sundarbans, another source
of interesting info: www.betelco.com/bd/sundar/sundar.html
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