The Indian pangolin in the Eastern Ghats 679
FIG. 1 The northern Eastern Ghats landscape in Andhra Pradesh, India, indicating the villages in which we conducted interviews for assessing the presence of the Indian pangolin Manis crassicaudata.
the interview.We used a smartphone to record interviews. After transcription of the interviews we used thematic coding to identify themes emerging from our data, which we report using per cent response frequencies. The occurrence of pangolins was estimated from where they were reported, as sightings, localities of capture, or from the presence of pangolin body parts such as scales.
FIG. 2 Per cent of the 60 interviewees who mentioned each of the six locations where pangolins were observed.
per cent of the population in each village that is tribal (Census of India, 2001). We conducted a total of 60 inter- views in 30 villages, using a semi-structured questionnaire (Supplementary Material 1), during August 2017–April 2018. We used a convenience sampling approach to assess drivers of hunting qualitatively rather than to facilitate gen- eralization of any findings to a wider population (Newing, 2010). Interviews were conducted by four people (VA, KP, RS and amember from the local Koya community) in either Telugu or Koya, as required. Older male respondents, usu- ally aged above 50, who were active hunters, were selected for interviews. Interview questions focused on three broad themes: (1) pangolin occurrence in the landscape, (2) pango- lin habitat preferences and (3) hunting practices and trade in pangolins. Interviewees were first shown photographs of the pangolin and asked if they could identify it. We used open-ended questions to obtain qualitative data. Verbal consent was obtained from respondents before
Results
Occurrence recorded by camera traps The camera traps photographed 18 species of mammals, including the gaur Bos gaurus, sloth bear Melursus ursinus, four-horned ante- lope Tetracerus quadricornis and sambar Rusa unicolor, all of which are categorized as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List (IUCN, 2019). However, none of the camera traps captured pangolins.
Occurrence reported by interviewees The majority of the respondents (88%) correctly identified the pangolin when shown photographs of the animal. More than half of the re- spondents (53%) reported seeing the animal, 30% had never seen it, and the restwere unsure if they had seen it. Nearly all respondents (93%) felt that pangolin numbers had declined drastically over the previous 10 years. Respondents men- tioned six habitat types in which they had seen a pangolin (Fig. 2), with most having been seen amongst rock cre- vices/boulders, next to their burrows or on slopes; 3%of respondents reported having seen pangolins feed on ants and termites.
Oryx, 2021, 55(5), 677–683 © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605319001303
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