Older matriarchs often guide herds through familiar corridors, revisiting feeding grounds and water sources used for decades. Over time, elephants’ repeated journeys have become seasons for us, a season we cherish and respect.
Did it rain today?
In cities, seasons are increasingly reduced to broad categories: heat, rain, cold. Even those distinctions seem to be fading. Entire days pass inside offices, sealed behind glass and artificial light, where weather becomes incidental background noise. For many urban lives, seasonality survives mostly as forecast notifications and wardrobe adjustments.
But in our collectives governed by ecological rhythms, seasons are not merely temperatures. They are behavioural shifts. They arrive through movement, sound, flowering cycles, silence, migration, and absence. They alter how humans and wildlife negotiate space with one another.
At Poomaale Collectives, the days feel shorter when elephants visit, and the season becomes a set of small surrenders. Human access to certain zones of the collective is intentionally reduced in the evenings. Quietness becomes operationally important. Outdoor illumination is deliberately minimised during the period of active wildlife movement. Exterior lights across the collective are typically discontinued by approximately 9:00 pm. Sometimes coexistence simply involves choosing not to step outside altogether.
Signs of elephants, a footprint and dung.
Signs of elephant presence appear throughout the estate almost daily. Footprints remain pressed into wet mud after rainfall. Broken branches lie scattered beside trails. Camera traps capture herds moving silently through mist-covered slopes during the night. Staff members regularly encounter fresh dung along pathways. Sometimes coffee beans appear inside the dung itself. They do not wander. This is another thing to understand, and it may be the thing that changes how you feel about them entirely.
Elephants are especially dependent upon memory. Older matriarchs often guide herds through familiar corridors, revisiting feeding grounds and water sources used for decades. Research has repeatedly shown how strongly elephants remember landscapes. Their survival depends partly upon recognising where resources reliably return every year.
The Western Ghats harbour approximately 25% of the global Asian elephant population, making it one of the most vital strongholds for the species. Asian elephants are extremely sociable, forming groups of six to seven related females that the oldest female, the matriarch, leads. Elephants are always close to a source of fresh water because they need to drink at least once a day. Indian elephants may spend nearly 18 hours a day feeding, and they can produce about 100kg of dung per day.
In Kodava folklore, the wild elephants of the Brahmagiri and Pushpagiri ranges are the sacred mounts and loyal companions of the forest spirits. Harming a wild elephant in Kodagu’s sacred groves is traditionally believed to invite the wrath of the forest gods, leading to generational curses on one’s Ainmane (ancestral house).
The Poomaale Collective falls well inside the established Asian elephant territory. Their pathways are shaped primarily through forage distribution and water availability. Grasslands around the collective regenerate after rainfall, providing fresh forage. The lake and perennial streams inside the collective provide them with water. They know where the jackfruits are planted.
Wildlife cannot rely upon permanent food sources. A valley filled with fruit one month may offer almost nothing several weeks later. To survive, animals must constantly move toward places where food and water remain available. Over time, these repeated journeys of elephants have become seasons for us, a season we cherish and respect. So when the lights go out at nine, when a path closes for a few weeks, when someone decides simply to stay indoors, none of it is an inconvenience. It is the smallest possible answer to an enormous responsibility.
