The Thar Desert Is Alive With Wildlife, Adaptation, And Hidden Biodiversity

I spent a long time, from 2006 to 2021, restoring a rocky tract in Jodhpur. That work led me into the desert several times a year, looking for seeds and plants. These journeys were also a way of getting to know the Thar: learning to recognise landscape features, unusual plants, spiny-tailed lizards and anything else that caught our eye.

One of the things we started noticing regularly was how easily the desert is misread. To an untrained eye, large parts of it can appear empty, degraded, or even barren. The official word one often hears for such places is “wasteland,” as if land must be green, forested or visibly productive to have value. But the more time we spent in the Thar, the more that word began to seem not just inaccurate, but dangerous. It made the invisible visible.

Among the first things that caught our attention were distinctive patches of low vegetation that looked like remnants of “original” desert flora. They must once have been part of larger tracts, but in the early 21st century, all we found were small relict patches, fragmented by roads, farms and mining. Still, there was something about these little micro-habitats that made it clear their plants were at home, perfectly adapted to where they were growing. They had a kind of coherence. The spacing of shrubs, the way grasses appeared after rain, the way lizards and insects moved through them, all seemed to suggest a system that had worked itself out over centuries. And they were gorgeous.

We asked shepherds and camel herders if they used a Marwari name for these beautiful little shrublands. What do you call this kind of habitat when your camel wanders off into one of these patches? They found it hard to understand what we were after and offered us place names instead. We would say, “No, no, we’re not asking about the name of the place.” Then they would look at us with an expression that said, “These city folks are really strange!”

So we invented a temporary name by borrowing the initials from the Marwari names of three plants, Seenio, Bui and Kheemp, that stood out in these shrublands like flags. “SBK habitats” is what we called them. The more we roamed the desert and the more we got to see and know them, the more curious we became about SBK habitats. They varied a lot because they changed with the minerals in the soil. Seenio, Bui, and Kheemp were usually present as broad-spectrum xerophytes, but many grasses and some other shrubs would shift as we crossed, say, from iron-rich sand to limestone soil.

This was one of the pleasures of learning the desert slowly. At first glance, everything can seem sparse and similar, especially to an eye trained to look for forests or lushness. But the longer one looks, the more distinctions begin to appear. A patch on gypsum does not feel like a patch on sandstone. A place grazed lightly does not behave like one scraped raw. A dry season does not erase life; it merely changes the terms on which life shows itself.

And then finally, in 2012, we met someone who said, “Of course, we have a name for them! We call them Roee!” It felt as if a heavy veil of mystery had suddenly lifted. A little research led us to Col. Todd in 1829, travelling astride a camel from Sindh to Jaisalmer, who noted: “The natural jungle of the Thar Desert is called Roee.”

Why was finding its name so thrilling? Because that could be a first step in conserving what we had come to recognise as a characteristic relict habitat of the Thar desert. Names matter. With a name, it might be possible to begin the process of looking for it, recognising it, appreciating it and, hopefully, eventually protecting it.

Why had it remained nameless all this time? Well, it hadn’t, of course, because it had a Marwari name all along. But not a name the wider world knew. How often had we heard foresters describe the desert as a “wasteland” with a dismissive wave of the hand? Being nameless is what had masked the existence of the Roee. Now, perhaps, there was a decent chance we could inject the word into the vocabulary people use when they think about or visit the Thar.

This matters because the Roee is not a failed land waiting to be improved. It is already a habitat, with its own plants, insects, reptiles, birds, grasses, soils and relationships with grazing. Its richness is not theatrical. Its beauty is low to the ground, in thorn, seed, bark, grass, flower and the minute adjustments that allow plants to live with heat, drought, browsing and poor soils.

This is not only true of the Roee. Across India, dry grasslands, scrublands, ravines, salt pans and desert habitats are often grouped under the lazy word “wasteland,” as if they are ecologically unfinished. But many of these landscapes are highly adapted systems, supporting forms of life that cannot simply be replaced by plantations or farms. To misread them as empty is often the first step towards damaging them. Some of the richest, most biodiverse habitats in the world are arid shrublands. The Fynbos at the tip of South Africa is the richest spot on earth in terms of the sheer number of plant species that grow there. There is the Mulga region in Western Australia, the Garrigue on the Mediterranean coast, and California’s Chaparral. Not forests, all low shrublands: rich and beautiful in their own way, and what is more, conserved, visited, photographed and loved for their individuality and intrinsic beauty.

The Roee deserves that kind of attention. Not because it resembles a forest, or because it can be made useful in some obvious human way, but because it is itself: a desert shrubland, shaped by climate, soil, grazing, drought and time. Once we learn to read it, the myth of emptiness begins to fall away.

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