Francis Buchanan (1870): Alluding obviously to the system of sacredness of forests in the Western Ghats-west coast of Uttara Kannada, Dr. Francis Buchanan, officer of the British East India Company, who travelled through Uttara Kannada in 1801, soon after capturing  Canara region by the British stated:
The forests are the property of the gods of the village in which they are situated, and the trees ought not to be cut without having leave from the Gauda (headman of the village)…. who here also is pujari (priest) to the temple of the village god. The idol receives nothing for granting this permission; but the neglect of the ceremony of asking his leave brings his vengeance on the guilty person.
Buchanan (1870 continued further: “Each village has a different god, some male, some female, but by the Brahmins they are called Saktis, as requiring bloody sacrifices to their appease their wrath”
From these statements may be inferred that the forests were virtually under the control of the village communities with well defined territories and many had sacred values attributed to them. Buchanan’s references to the then practice of slashing and burning of forests in the hills for shifting cultivation, indicates the fact that all forests were not sacred, and the sacred forests also bore the name kan or kanu.
W.A. Talbot (1909):  In his monumental floristic work Forest Flora of the Bombay Presidency and Sind Talbot referred to the sacredness of kans, a rare such remark from a British officer:
In North Kanara and even as far east as the Hangal subdivision of the Dharwar district along the Western Ghats under an annual rainfall of not less than 70”, isolated irregularly distributed patches of rain-forest, locally called Kans and Rais are found surrounded by cultivation or monsoon-forest. These are often the mere remnant of larger areas and have in many instances been respected by the natives as the abode of a sylvan deity.
Talbot’s statement makes it clear that even towards the drier east of Uttara Kannada district bordering the Hangal taluk, with rainfall much lower, compared to the mountainous malnadu part of Western Ghats, there existed evergreen forests equivalent to rain forests, the kans, which were home to village deities. These kans were already on the decline as they were mere “remnant of larger areas.”
The special protection given to the kans by the village communities of Sorab in Shimoga district had won full praise from Peter Ashton (1988), renown tropical forest ecologist, who considered kans as:
Prototypes of a technique currently being promoted as a new approach to forestry: agroforestry. In a region dominated by deciduous forests (Sorab is bordering on the drier Deccan Plateau) that were annually burned, the kans stood out as belts, often miles long, of evergreen forest along the moist scrap of the Western Ghat hills. Assiduously protected by the villagers, these once natural forests had been enriched by the inhabitants through interplanting of jackfruits, sago and sugar palms, pepper vine, and even coffee, an exotic.
Ashton (1988) justifies such kind of conservation in India seeking an explanation in its culture:
The Indian sub-continent is without doubt the world centre of human cultural diversity… The Hindus have inherited perceptions of a people who have lived since ancient times in a humid climate particularly favourable for forest life. Settled people, they see themselves as one with the natural world, as both custodians and dependents…. Forests of the mountains and watersheds have been traditionally been sacred; springs and the natural landscape in their vicinity have attracted special veneration. The Hindus learned from their predecessors millennia ago, a mythology, sociology and technology of irrigation that has enabled the most intensive yet sustainable agriculture humanity has so far devised.
In the above remarks, Ashton was referring to culture based conservation in India, and how the veneration of watershed forests in the highlands facilitated “most intensive yet sustainable agriculture humanity has so far devised.”
Area under the kans
It is difficult to get a consolidated account of the area under the kans, at the time of the establishment of British authority over the forest resources of the malnadu regions of Karnataka. It appears that survey and demarcation of the kans was an incomplete work. Several kans of Uttara Kannada district got merged with rest of the state reserved forests and lost their special identities. They are to be recognized today by their names, such as Kathalekan, Karikan, Hulidevarukan etc. and also by the relics of primeval vegetation that still might be persisting in them to some degrees. According to the earliest ever survey on the kans conducted by Brandis and Grant (1868), Sorab taluk of Shimoga district had 171 kans covering a total of 32,594 acres (about 13,000 ha). Halesorabkan, the largest of them covered an area of about 400 ha. The kans  were different  from the secondary forests of deciduous kinds. Such systematic documentation of kans was not conducted elsewhere. Cowlidurg (present Thirthahalli taluk) was leading in the number of kans (436); Kadur district (present Chikmagalur) had 128 kans (Brandis and Grant, 1868).
The Gazetteer of Mysore: Shimoga District (1920) merely refers to the kans as evergreen forests of not much value, at a time when the hardwood timber yielding deciduous forests were paid much more attention. The Gazetteer states on the kans of Sagar taluk:
Excepting the great Hinni forest, which lies to the south of the Gersoppa Falls, the remainder are chiefly kans, or tracts of virgin evergreen forest, in most of which pepper grows abundantly self-sown and uncared for, but little of the produce being collected owing to the depredations of the monkeys.
The Gazetteer considers the kans towards the summits of ghats as not of much use owing to inaccessibility. It admits to the decline of kans; yet had much in praise for the kans of Sorab:
The taluk of Sorab abounds with kans, many of which are cultivated with pepper vines and sometimes coffee. The sago palm(Caryota urens) is also much grown for the sake of its toddy. These kans are apparently the remains of the old forests, which appear once to have stretched as far east as Anavatti. At the present day at Anavatti itself there  is no wood, and the surrounding country is clothed with either scrub jungle or small deciduous forest….Kans are found also in Sagar, Nagar and other Malnad taluks, but those in Sorab are, from their number, situation and accessibility the most valuable.