Dasabettu Mathayes D’sa a.k.a. Desa is a retired industrial worker who lived 40 years in Thane, Mumbai, a densely populated city in India, who now lives his dream of growing a forest in a small village called Satwadi, near to Kundapura of Karnataka in the west coast of India. He also has built his dream treehouse called “Hornbill House” named after a bird for bird watching and spending his time overlooking the trees he planted to grow to become a forest.
Desa was born in 1961 to a farming family in a remote village called Dasabettu, Aroor around 20 k.m from Udupi, Karnataka. He belonged to a lower-class family where his parents earned their daily bread through farming activities to take care of Desa and his 5 other siblings. His house was in the deep interiors of coastal Karnataka, there was no road to his house at the time. He had to walk the forest path with long sticks or fire sticks at night to save himself from the wild animal attacks. Right from childhood, he has always loved the dense forests, rivers and flora & fauna. Evergreen forests of western ghats were his deeply loved subject. He bicycled 20 k.m. every day to his pre-university college (PUC) as he could not afford to go by public transport.
After completing his PUC in Science, he moved to Mumbai (then Bombay) in 1977 in search of a job to help his family back in his village. He joined Raptakos Brett & Co. as a helper after a couple of months of job hunt. He started earning and helped his family back home. He helped his younger siblings get an education. He got married in 1994 and lived in Thane with his wife and a son who was born in 2000, until his retirement in June 2016. He left Mumbai in 2017 leaving his wife and son behind, to pursue his dream of growing forest and living his rest of the life for nature in Kundapura.
He spent his entire savings that earned from his retirement to purchase a wasteland (45 cents or ~0.5 acre) of red stone quarry in Satwadi in 2017. He planted a variety of wild trees that are on the verge of diminishing. He watered them regularly during the summer season and took care of them during the Mansoon season. Its been 3 years and the trees have been grown big to make Desa proud of his half-acre project that sounded till a hundred miles.
During his years in Mumbai, he has travelled across India from Jammu to Kanya Kumari and Gujarat to Namdapha, the last corner of Assam including the islands of Andaman and Nicobar and Lakshadweep. He has seen most of the national forests and numerous wildlife sanctuaries of India; so do waterfalls and heritage sites. He spent his weekends and holidays wandering around the forests of Maharastra and especially in the Sanjay Gandhi National Park starting from Nookand Corner or from Thane to Borivali either as a solo or with some minded friends for more than a decade. He also wandered in the Bhimashankar Wildlife Sanctuary by hiking the forest through various routes and spending a number of days observing the wildlife as many as 25 times either solo or with a friend.
A long time member of Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS), attended various nature camps across the nation for wildlife studies of BNHS. A lifetime member of Youth Hostels Association of India (YHAI) and has participated in almost all trekking programs held in both State level and National Levels in the country. He also worked Govt. of Telangana Wildlife Department as a volunteer for wildlife studies in Nallamala forest. He has lead hundreds of students and professionals in various trekking conducted by the organizations and himself. As an individual, he has led many groups of trekkers to various destinations in the Western Ghats region as a resource person.
He currently lives in Moodlakatte, Kundapura a km away from his dream forest. He owns a bicycle which is the mode of transport and he uses it to go pretty much everywhere as far as it can be peddled. He also owns a small boat with a tiny petrol engine on which he roams around the Mangrove forest near to his house. In Kundapura, the effort has been taken by him to spread awareness to save Mangrove forest, its importance for the benefit of mankind among nature lovers, students and journalists. He has been helping to make the area a tourist hub by taking people on his boat to explore the beauty of the small trees that grow in the coastal saline or brackish water and also for the purpose of self-employment to the locals. He also planted and watered plants in his village roads.
Currently, he survives with a very small monthly pension from his retirement and with the occasional tips he gets from the boat trips. Support him to grow his forest so that it will be there for the future generation to live.