What Makes the Deccan Dry Forest a Different Kind of Pressure Cooker
The Deccan plateau receives between 500 and 900 mm of rain annually, enough to prevent true desert, not enough to allow the dense canopy of the Western Ghats. What grows instead is thorn scrub, dry deciduous woodland, and open grassland stitched together by seasonal streams that vanish by March. Temperatures in Telangana, Karnataka, and Maharashtra's interior districts regularly breach 42°C in May. For any animal living here, the problem is not just heat. It is the combination of heat, seasonal drought, and a food supply that collapses and then explodes in tight windows. The animals that have stayed are the ones that solved that problem in specific, measurable ways.
