The malaise of vehicle based tourism in our forests

Tourism in Tiger Sanctuaries has been temporarily banned by the Supreme Court.

During the late nineties, had done a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation on what percentage of a wildlife sanctuary, in that case, Bandipur, was under roads and associated tracts. With more than six hundred kilometres of motorable track and the associated 'visibility lines' that we have, and more than a thousand kilometres as fire-lines, at least some fifteen or twenty percent of the sanctuary is laid waste and bare (at least for vegetation dwelling animals). Here, even the free regeneration of plants is affected and only some which are able to withstand the hand of man thrive.

For example, if one drove through these so called tourist roads and paths, say, at Nagarahole, ever wondered why there are so many more Ficus species here along the tracks when compared to the interior of the forest? That is because the practice of clearing removes any seedling that germinates. Since most Ficus there start their lives as epiphytes, germinating on existing trees and sending their roots down, they are already 'trees' by the time they come close to the ground and are hence not cut. So one sees more Ficus along the visibility lines. So with the net result, we have more members of colonising (or R-selected or ruderal, to use formal terms) species, in these managed strips. The point is that, in all this talk about ‘wildlife’, the vegetation gets left out. The long term health of the plant communities, as plant assemblages, gets forgotten conveniently. Destroying the ruderal plant species might be easy, but is not the action we should be taking. Is not prevention better than cure? and prudence better than valour?

Banning vehicle based tourism, reducing the enormous lengths of motorable tourism tracks, and scrapping the associated visibility lines should do wonders to a forest. Hail wilderness, Hail vegetation!

Dr Joseph George: a brief note

Dr Joseph George was a person of extraordinary humility and intellect, who started the first birdwatching group in Bangalore in 1972.

For all of us birdwatchers who came in contact with him, he inspired us with his knowledge and humility, and had a way of making people learn about birds. He encouraged us to make our own observations, always emphasising that contributions to our knowledge of birds could be done by anyone and not just scientists. Though an organic chemist himself, he had many research papers on birds to his credit, and encouraged us to publish as well. Even the first ever publication of Dr Ramachandra Guha, the author, cricket fan and historian, written when Dr Guha was eleven, was because of Dr George! And it was, of course, on birds.

Dr George was meticulous in his observations and his work on bamboo bird nest boxes is a classic, merging his professional interests in wood science with his hobby interest in birds. The use of dyed feathers dispersed from a hillside so that swifts could pick it up for nest building, and the subsequent detection of those dyed feathers in the nests at the Forest Research Institute, was innovative. His counts of migrating Grey Drongos to determine timing of migration, and his mapping technique by using pre-dawn counts of stationary singing males to estimate territory densities were way ahead of his time. The latter possibly the earliest use of that technique anywhere in the world. And strangely, at a time when Indian ornithology did not even know the existence of an average, or of statistics.

Starting his career during the British times at the FRI, Dehra Dun, he went on to become the Assistant Director of the Buildings Research Institute in Roorkee, and then the Director at the Indian Plywood Industries Research and Training Institute, Bangalore. He was an adhesive specialist par excellence, with a special interest in wood substitutes. And to this end he worked hard and achieved one technological innovation after another, and derived more for nature conservation than what most of us only dream of. He had many patents to his credit and a few more coming. Even at ninety, he used to go everyday to his laboratory, and also actively involve himself in gardening which he was a great enthusiast of.

He has left a legacy for Bangalore that is at least a thousand times more birdwatchers than he started out with. And, that in short, is Dr Joseph George for you!

Trekking on the wrong Trail!

Trekking is not countryside walking. The way it is practised here, it is a mad run from one place to another, often in wilderness areas for the thrill of it. Its practitioners barely find time to observe anything in nature, or better still, take time to enjoy the smell, sound and the tranquillity of it. Yes, with photography becoming popular, it could be, but is not quite there just yet. Last week's death of a youngster in the Ragihalli forest of the Bannerghatta range and the missing trekkers sometime back in Sakleshpura are pointers to a larger malaise that wilderness areas are suffering from, called Ecotourism.

The Government in Karnataka and elsewhere is promoting ecotourism in a big way. The Karnataka government has established its own chain of luxury hotels called Jungle Lodges and Resorts, which has been granted exclusive use of many tracts. In addition, local communities, private businessmen, NGOs, and even researchers, are in the fray. All out to conquer that last frontier called wilderness.

The government and the people, in the sole interest of maximising revenue, are literally stripping the wild animals and plants of their privacy and home. In the big chase for stakeholders' rights, with every human, thinking or otherwise, learned or ignorant, concerned or indifferent, becoming a stakeholder, we have turned all wild animals and plants into tenants in their own territory. All for an intangible thing called revenue. Revenue from every conceivable quarter! Be it material utilization meant for one's own use transformed to material trade to generate monetary gain, or a vehicular parade in the wilderness called eco-tourism, we are doing enormous damage to our ecosystems. An urgent need is to sit up and take note of. We have effectively transformed trustees into traders, and wildlife into tenants. The question is should we? In this a big roulette, it is the fauna and flora that are coming out as the losers.

Like every coin which has faces, and an edge to go with it, there are arguments and viewpoints, many looking in opposite directions. This article pleads for the ecosystem. The other viewpoint is there, everywhere!

Karnataka has 38,284 square kilometres of forest area, which comprises of about 19.96 per cent of its geographical area. It include dense, open and scrub forests. Karnataka is also blessed with 60% of the Western Ghats, which is a world heritage site and a global biological hotspot. Human settlements in and around many of wilderness areas is a common feature. In recent times, these areas are in some sense encircled by resorts and lodges which caters to a large urban crowds to enjoy nature. In addition, there a large number of adventure groups in urban areas which organise trekking in wilderness areas both during the day and night almost throughout the year. The forest department is not far behind in this race, there are official designated routes in many of our wilderness areas. Some of the popular trekking routes include the Kukke Subramanya to Pushpagiri route, Kakkabe to Tadiyandamol, Samse to Kudremukh peak, etc.

Trekking is believed to be an ecologically sound way of experiencing nature and is much advocated. However, it is far from truth. Trekking, the way it is practised in Karnataka has several impacts, most of which is ecologically damaging. The immediate effects are visible - broken liquor bottles, aluminium cans, plastic covers, gutka sachets, paper, etc on the waysides of trails and in our water bodies. These often are not because of the trekkers themselves, but by people who visit these areas made famous by trekkers. These are impacts are less damaging, can be controlled easily by way of ensuring that visitors don't throw these items. The damage can also be rectified by organising a collection drive to clean up the place. But prevention is always better than cure.

The long-term impacts on the habitats have unfortunately not got adequate attention from researchers and authorities. There is hardly any research study done to understand the damage occurring in any of our wilderness areas. The obvious impacts, which have been scientifically proved, elsewhere are discussed further.

Destruction of vegetation to clear thickets to make way for easy movement and trampling of seedlings is the largest form of destruction of the habitat. Usually trekkers carry a machete and a common practice is to clear away thorny vegetation and protruding branches, and also bushes protrude into the trail. The regeneration of plants and trees get affected enormously. Over time, one can notice in most of the trekking routes that the width of these trekking corridors widen progressively. And this is very significant ecologically. In many cases, these trekking routes have slowly got converted into metalled roads. This is also a start of a process called fragmentation of habitats.

The other profound impact is soil compaction. As people walk on trails, there is a progressive compaction of soil. Compaction of the soil and leaf litter can lead to the reduction of air spaces within the soil structure. This change in the soil structure prevents germination of seeds as a good flow of water and air is important for root penetration. Walking repeatedly on vegetation over time can also leads to its death. It can take decades to reverse this compaction process naturally.

Trampling also directly kills smaller organisms like ants, earthworms, millipedes, and bugs which are crucial to maintaining the integrity of the soil structure and quality. It could damage fruiting bodies of fungi (mushrooms and toadstools) which are so crucial for nutrient recycling in a forest. Exposure and drying of the soil can destroy ectomycorrhiza associated with specific plants, existing continuously for millions of years through evolutionary time. These fungi in heavy rainfall zones penetrate fallen leaves and litter, and transport minerals and nutrients directly to the plant/tree roots, before there is a chance of heavy rain washing it off. In drier zones, ectomycorrhiza help in mobilizing phosphorus which is an essential element for both plants and animals, and make it available to plants.

Trekking trails provides an access point for colonising species from outside the wilderness area. For example, the Fire Ant (Solenopsis) gets into these trails because of human presence. Others like this would include the Odour Ant (Tapinoma), and the Crazy Ant (Anaplolepis).

Food wastes draw animals to the trail while a noisy trekking group can disturb birds and animals. Most of the shy bird species such as warblers, babblers, spider hunters and all the mammals such as deer, Sambhar, Tiger, Leopard, Elephant, etc try to avoid the trekking area. Research studies prove that long term effects of noise pollution could lead to birds failing to nest in the area and avoiding the area fully. Forest fires due to cigarettes and campsites are another major threat to our dry deciduous and scrub forests.

While the Karnataka Forest Department is trying to install signboards cautioning the movement of large mammals and warning trekkers to keep away from illegally entering protected areas, more needs to be done. Most of the efforts appear to be geared towards the safety of the trekkers. Being the custodian, there is a greater need to exercise the legal provisions efficiently under the wildlife and forest conservation acts for violations and regulate it in all our wilderness areas. The forest department should with the help of researchers periodically assess damages to habitats and the ecosystem, and close down routes or lessen the foot traffic so that the habitats can recuperate. Trekking should be strongly discouraged when the soils are wet (during monsoon) as it could lead to soil erosion. However blocking access totally would encourage unauthorised entry, so it just needs to be regulated.

To preserve our ecosystems there is a larger need to orient trekking and other activities from being a mere endurance sport to an educative activity. We will need to relearn to appreciate and preserve nature's wonderful gifts. If this is to happen, we all have to play our role in this important task of conservation. It could be so informative to walk on a route where important and noticeable ecological features are flagged, both on a hand out map and on the trail, as watch points (thankfully not as watch towers!). We could then look forward to insightful education, rather than mere entertainment for the citizens of today, and of course, for the citizens of tomorrow.

 

– SUNIL KUMAR M & KRISHNA MB, 24th July 2012.

For the edited version of the article, published in the 24th July Spectrum supplement of Deccan Herald, click here.

Why we need Islands in Urban Lakes

Temporal distribution of breeding in Bangalore’s birds

Here is a graph of the temporal distribution of breeding in Bangalore's birds. While compiling the Annotated Checklist of the Birds of Bangalore, had also put together the number of bird species breeding every month within a 40km radius from the GPO. Therefore thought that I would just put it together with Marshall's compilation of the number of species known to breed every month in India and see what emerges. This book is from 1877. So over this century, with all the climate change happening, has the breeding of birds in India shifted? Here is a small comparison between the present Bangalore and of the past India.

 

 

A difference of a month would mean that Marshall’s data was perhaps essentially from north India where the monsoon, and possibly the breeding, is delayed by a month compared to the south. The lowest in the breeding in the north is October and November, while at Bangalore it is December. This also parallels the withdrawal of the monsoons earlier from the north when compared to south India.

The wider seasons could also be influenced by the planned planting in Bangalore, of sequential flowering tree species, so that there are flowers right through the year: a horticultural concept introduced by GH Krumbiegel, after whom a road in Bangalore has been named. Creation of recreational gardens and parks is a part of urbanization, and in fact, the early drawings/paintings of Bangalore indicate a barren landscape. This shows that gardens and parks are a indeed a part of the urbanization of the Bangalore area.

The ‘concretisation’ of Bangalore is a different matter altogether, and recent data if compiled could perhaps show the impact of this too. One could expect a reduction in the number of species reported breeding here.  Lack of reporting could be one of the factors, but with digital photography becoming so pervasive, and social e-networking opportunities on the increase, it is unlikely.

The third graph below is how sample data from recent times would look. This is from the reports on BngBirds with alternate years considered, essentially over the past decade. The uni-modal distribution has become bi-modal with the original peak becoming a trough. This needs to be looked into more thoroughly.

 Graphed data extracted from: 
a collation of BngBirds email discussion group breeding reports, by Rashmi Sasidharan

 

 

 

 

 

copyright krishna.mb 2012

Dr Joseph George

 

Dr Joseph George

1st October 1921 -  9th July 2012

Both photographs taken at his residence on 2nd June 2012

 

 

 

Dr Joseph George
1st October 1921 to 9th July 2012

.

Dr Joseph George is no more. For all of us birdwatchers who came in contact with him, he inspired us with his knowledge and humility. And that humility was really striking. Although his English was excellent, he never used a capital ‘I’ in his writings. That was him, very characteristically him.

He encouraged us all to make our own observations, and made us understand that contributing to our knowledge of birds could be done by anyone, not just scientists. Though an organic chemist professionally, he wrote papers on birds, and encouraged us to publish too. Even the first ever publication of Dr Ramachandra Guha, the author, cricket fan and historian, written when Dr Guha was eleven, was because of Dr George! And it was, of course, on birds.

Dr George was meticulous in his observations and his work on bamboo nest boxes is a classic, merging his professional interests in wood science with his hobby interest in birds. The use of dyed feathers dispersed from a hillside so that swifts could pick it up for nest building, and the subsequent detection of those dyed feathers in the nests at the Forest Research Institute, was innovative. His counts of migrating Grey Drongos to determine timing of migration, and his mapping technique by using pre-dawn counts of stationary singing males to estimate territory densities were way ahead of his time. The latter possibly the earliest use of that technique anywhere in the world. And strangely, at a time when Indian ornithology did not even know the existence of an average, or of statistics.

He got his bachelor’s degree at St Joseph’s College, Trichinopoly, and went on to continue his studies at St John’s College, Agra, because he got a scholarship which he needed. His doctoral degree, if I recollect right, was by papers. It was chemistry through and through!

In his long innings at the Forest Research Institute at Dehra Dun, he and one Mr Gurdial Singh, a former Deputy Headmaster of the Doon School who was later awarded a Padma Shri, were the people who literally ‘ran’ the group birdwatching effort there. At that time, and especially so when the late Mr PD Stracey (of the Stracey Memorial School on St Marks Road fame) was the Director of the FRI, it was unofficially mandatory for every IFS trainee to go birdwatching with the group.

He then moved on to become the Assistant Director of the Buildings Research Institute, Roorkee, which had the late Lt. General Sir Harold Williams as its Director, and also Dr Dinesh Mohan, who later went on to become its Director after Sir Williams. Both these people were birdwatchers too. Dr George used to tell me that all three would travel as far down as Delhi from Dehra Dun, watching birds, in Sir Williams’ car. That of course, was only possible on non working days/hours when they met as birdwatchers outside the framework of official hierarchy!

It was during this tenure here that Dr George prepared a tick-able checklist of the birds of Delhi, actually two editions, both not authored, one in the fifties and the other in the sixties. Sir Williams funded the printing of both these checklists, and they were printed (but paid for!) at the Printing Press of the Bengal Engineers (like the MEG here). Sir Williams had been the Director-General of the Bengal Engineers earlier, and was the last serving British Indian Army Officer to hand over charge after Independence, and continued to serve here on the request of the new Indian government. (That Dr George prepared the checklists I know for sure because I have the correspondence and the accounts in my collection somewhere).

He then moved over to Bangalore, as the Director of the Indian Plywood Industries’ Research (and now, Training) Institute at Peenya. From a birdwatchers’ point of view, he vastly improved the garden of the campus (I’ve even seen open clump bamboos there, and Redstarts). And of course he started group birdwatching in Bangalore in 1972, after he came here in 1970. This was with Mr Perumal, the wildlife photographer, and his friend, the late one Mr Upendra, of the Automobile Association of Southern India.

Dr George during all his stay in Bangalore, both at IPIRI and later as a Consultant, was actively involved in developing adhesives for particle boards, essentially wood substitutes. And to this end he worked hard and achieved one technological innovation after another, and derived more for nature conservation than what most of us only dream of. Though people had made paddy husk boards in the laboratory, Dr George achieved the first ever commercial viability in the mass manufacture of paddy husk boards by developing adhesives which could be used in low enough commercially viable quantities. Within the last year he was actively developing new ‘green’, petroleum product free adhesives for the baton-particle-stem board industry. He had many patents to his credit, and a few more coming. He was also involved in developing standards for the Indian Standards Institution.

He was also the editor of the Wood journal for many years. Ever since the day the Newsletter for Birdwatchers was being printed, Dr George did the painstaking proofreading of every issue, a thankless job for which he was unfortunately not given adequate credits or attribution.

As others have mentioned he had a way of making people learn about birds. He would never ‘pronounce’ identification like many of us do in front of beginners, but would painstakingly encourage them to observe and note characters. And he was humble. However small the other person was (and I am punning the word small), he would never insist on his word and argue, showing great control and restraint.

As much as he was humble, he was also particular about quality, and had told me on occasions that the quality we had achieved would never do. He had vast experience in technical editing, having had to do that as a part of his job, and for his superiors, in his long career. He made me sit with him when he edited the Annotated Checklist of the Birds of Bangalore, constantly asking for clarifications and our intended interpretation of what we had written every few lines. In the bargain, if I recollect right, I got three weeks of free lunch and good work every afternoon, full time! And a few years before that, when we did our first annual mid winter water-bird count report of 1989, Oh my! What a learning experience! It was indeed a revelation that we could write so badly, and so candidly and confidently too! When I wrote my first note on the identification of warblers, he taught me to make the difference between time and space, and asked me what is it that I intended to say: that the Blyth’s Reed Warbler calls ‘here and there’ or ‘now and then’, when I had in my writing messed up between the two. Later, it was he who insisted on me doing up that note on warbler identification which Dr Subramanya so kindly and excellently illustrated. This, I remember, came after a presentation to the group after a birdwatching outing.

Dr George was a great gardening enthusiast. He used to collect wild flower seeds and make little packets out of these (‘potna’ as you call it in Kannada), which he used to give to us youngsters and ask us to go plant or throw the seeds in vacant plots. And I used to collect Ipomoea coccinea and Ipomoea quamoclit seeds from him in all those early years. On the last day that I met him on June 2nd, he lamented how nobody in his apartment compound and block was interested in the garden, and the difficulty he had in going out and physically supervising the work. They, obviously did not come up to his expectations! He, of course, was over ninety but was still going everyday to his laboratory to work, which he never gave up on.

He has left a legacy for Bangalore that is at least a thousand times more birdwatchers than he started out with. And, that in short, is Dr Joseph George for you!

 

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This note was originally written for the birdwatching community of Bangalore subscribed to the BngBirds email discussion group on YahooGroups. Feedback of the readers is gratefully acknowledged.

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An old photograph taken on his birthday with birdwatchers who went to wish him
1st October 1994

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Press coverage / abridged version:

Way ahead of his time

 

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Some lost lakes of Bangalore

… AND SOME MORE WHICH ARE STILL SURVIVING!

SOME MAN-MADE LAKES OF BANGALORE,
PHOTOGRAPHED DURING THE ANNUAL MID-WINTER
WATERBIRD COUNT OF JANUARY 1989.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY KRISHNA MB AND SUBRAMANYA S.
CITATION CREDITS EXPECTED.
ALL CONTENT AND IMAGES COPYRIGHT (C) KRISHNA MB, 1989

 

YELLA MALLAPPA CHETTY TANK ON KOLAR ROAD, JANUARY 1989

 

RACHENA HALLI FROM BUND, JANUARY 1989

 

HENNUR, NOT EXISTING NOW, JANUARY 1989

 

DODDABEGUR, HOSUR ROAD, JANUARY 1989

 

VARTUR NEAR WHITEFIELD, FROM BUND, JANUARY 1989

 

VARTUR NEAR WHITEFIELD, JANUARY 1989

 

SARJAPURA, JANUARY 1989

 

SADAHALLI, NORTH BANGALORE, JANUARY 1989

 

RAMPURA, KOLAR ROAD, JANUARY 1989

 

OBICHUDANAHALLI ON KANAKAPURA ROAD, JANUARY 1989
(THE HIGHEST EMBANKMENT IN THE BANGALORE AREA)

 

NAGAVARA FORESHORE, JANUARY 1989

 

NAGAVARA, JANUARY 1989

 

KODIGEHALLI, NORTH BANGALORE, JANUARY 1989

 

KALKERE, OFF KOLAR ROAD, JANUARY 1989

 

KAIKONDANAHALLI, SARJAPUR ROAD, JANUARY 1989

 

HARAGADDE, ANEKAL ROAD, WITH LESSER WHISTLING TEALS TAKING OFF,
JANUARY 1989

 

Why we need islands in lakes...

 

 

Lake pictures from Bangalore of 1989

SOME MAN-MADE LAKES OF BANGALORE, PHOTOGRAPHED DURING THE  
ANNUAL MID-WINTER WATERBIRD COUNT OF  JANUARY 1989

PHOTOGRAPHS BY KRISHNA MB AND SUBRAMANYA S; CITATION AND CREDITS EXPECTED

COPYRIGHT KRISHNA MB, 1989

 

YELCHENA HALLI ON KOLAR ROAD, JANUARY 1989

 

RAYASANDRA, JANUARY 1989

 

NELAMANGALA, JANUARY 1989

 

MUGBALA ON KOLAR ROAD, JANUARY 1989

 

MANTAPA ON BANNERGHATTA ROAD, JANUARY 1989

 

MADHUREKERE IN NORTH BANGALORE, JANUARY 1989

 

KODIPALYA-NAGARURU (VADDARAHALLI), JANUARY 1989

 

KODATUR, NORTH BANGALORE, JANUARY 1989

 

KANNAMANGALA, NORTH BANGALORE, JANUARY 1989

 

JIGANI, ANEKAL ROAD, JANUARY 1989

 

HEBBAL, JANUARY 1989

 

DODDATUMKUR, NORTH BANGALORE, JANUARY 1989

 

DODDASANNE, NORTH BANGALORE, JANUARY 1989

 

See also: Some Lost Lakes of Bangalore

 

The fascination with things large...

People are fascinated with large things: large buildings, large mammals, large birds, and so on. When it comes to living things, lineages have species which grow bigger and then disappear in evolutionary time. The capability of animals to adapt to environmental change is linked to size and thus generation time. So are we making much ado about large birds and mammals becoming rarer? Remembering the Cope's rule...

Some old reading:

Ecological Strategies and Population Parameters.

The eolution of body size: what keeps organisms small?

Cope's rule, the island rule and the scaling of mammalian population density

How big should a mammal be? A macroecological look at mammalian body size over space and time

Cope's Rule and the Dynamics of Body Mass Evolution in North American Fossil Mammals

and very many more available on a search

 

 

On the need for Pedestrian Spaces

The recent news that four hundred kilometres of roads in Bangalore are to be widened makes sad reading. Much of this widening would be at the cost of footpaths and their umbrageous trees in the older localities. And such beautiful trees cannot be wished for even with a magic wand, while a road or a building can happen overnight with a politician’s wave!

This widening affects some one hundred and forty roads for the time being. We have some thousand eight hundred or so kilometres of roads in Bangalore. What we are losing amounts to nearly a quarter of the road length that we have today. 

What is tragic is that we are losing the one single feature which characterises the walking space anywhere. That is the shade giving trees which go with it. Be it a park, a garden or a footpath, it is the trees that make the walk more pleasureable. Yes, we do require good surfaces too, especially for the aged, but trees literally provide the icing on the cake. And everywhere, tyrants are bringing down the trees, either through policy or bad planning. 

Take Lalbagh, where literally tens of thousands of people come everyday for their walk.  It is having its trees removed or killed blatantly. The recent killing of a healthy Eucalyptus citriodora in its prime, by the construction of a strangling concrete platform around it, only elicited some silly explanations when pressed for by the press. A concrete construction at the cost of a healthy genetic resource tree? It looks all the more silly if we realise that Eucalypts cross-hybridise very easlily. What you breed here will never be genetically like the first generation introduced tree, which it was.  But the sad fact is that we are laying barren what could have been the pride of any city: a garden!

Road widening is supposed to help traffic flows. But here, it is invariably at the cost of the already penalised pedestrian who literally has no walking space. If we look at the casualty figures for road accidents, one would find that more than half of all accident deaths in the country, is that of pedestrians. Any other group affected accounts for less than a seventh of this number. In Bombay, our most crowded city, pedestrians account for some eighty percent of all road casualty cases. Even on our inter-city roads and highways, pedestrians account for nearly half the number of fatal accidents.

Funnily, this makes me wonder if pedestrians are protected at all. Just imagine, if we had allowed all the footpath trees to remain, we would not have had the wayward vehicles and SUVs ploughing into people, running along footpaths and causing mass deaths that we keep hearing about in the news these days!

Recollect those old days where a school child could happily weave its way on the footpath, shielded from the whizzing traffic by the giant footpath trees that were the silent sentinels?  You too would have perhaps walked home with gay abandon, passing tree trunk after tree trunk, never realising that each of those massive trees could instantly stop a wayward vehicle in its tracks!

It is tragic that we would be never letting  the next generation enjoy that previlege of either walking along a footpath, walking under a tree, or have a native defence against wayward vehicles. It is also equally tragic that any intelligent protest falls on such deaf ears!

 

[2008-11-03] 

Urban Birds as Miners' Canaries

Don't be surprised at the kinds of birds found in our cities. The cumulative list for Bangalore alone is about 340 species, which is more than half the number of species found in Peninsular India. Likewise, most other Indian cities also play host to a good percentage of the zonal species. Delhi has well over 400 species, and many others likewise have a good representation of the regional avifauna.  In fact a free software called BirdSpot, written by a Bangalore birdwatcher, allows one to draw a freehand shape over a map of India and get a list of species found there. One has to just get the software downloaded from the internet, install it, and check the various towns and cities for the number of species found in and around those towns. The results would surely surprise you.  

One may begin to wonder why is it that cities have so many species. When we think of cities, we normally picture overcrowded and congested lanes with shops touching wall to wall, dusty, dirty, noisy streets and the only green visible in the paint used. But, what we tend to forget is that for every such overcrowded part, we have the beautiful boulevards, the mall and the high value shopping areas, the industrial suburbs and open spaces. At the other end of the 'green street' we have the avenues, the gardens, parks and the residential areas. We also have water flowing in the valleys, impounded as lakes here and there by an embankment. We of course also tend to have irrigated cultivation downriver of these lakes. We have in many cases the hummocky and hilly country, as in Bangalore. And then of course, we have the airspace over a city! 

The city is in fact a mosaic, a cosmopolitan mix of many habitats that birds make use of. When we talk of city birds, we are of course talking about all those which could be visiting or living in the habitats mentioned earlier.  There are some interesting facts though. There are no urban birds which are exclusive to an urban area. All are from neighbouring rural areas. A study done by Frances Bonier at Virginia Tech examined data from many cities of the world and assessed whether urban birds were more tolerant of different environmental conditions. She found that urban birds have a broader environmental tolerance than the rural congeners, and had a wider distribution. It is a fact that if a species' range is wider, the variation in the environmental conditions that it can live in is also greater. Hence, such species make it better in an urban environment. 

Not all birds found in a city are common. About a third can be considered as wandering or those which have lost their way. Birds are highly mobile and many individuals of different kinds keep moving out of their usual haunts and land up at new places. It is technically called dispersal. Some of these birds could even colonise a new area.  Many of the birds found in our cities are migratory. All our cities are visited in winter by migratory birds from the distant north. We have many birds from central and north Eurasia spending their time here from September to April. Some are from just across the Himalaya. Many of these are small, and some like the Greenish Leaf Warblers that come to our gardens are much smaller than a sparrow! Wetlands in and near cities receive thousands of migratory birds, though this is reducing with ill-planned development. Ducks like Garganey, Shoveller and Pintail come in thousands. Likewise, shorebirds like the Green, the Spotted and Common Sandpipers come in large numbers, as do their larger relatives like the Greenhsank. Then there are the stints, especially the Little Stint, having a breeding range well across near the Arctic Circle and beyond. And how big are these stints? Around the size of a sparrow! Whether it is the ducks, or the sandpipers, or the geese, or the plovers, all are fast flying birds. They just would not be able to clear the kind of distances that they do flying at the speed of our herons and egrets (which are residents here).  

Many birds in our environs are quite visible. Take the Small Green Barbet for example. A dumpy green fruit eating bird with a white and brown head and a green body, which makes a hole in a tree for a nest, like a woodpecker does. Ask anybody who has ever looked at the life around him in Bangalore, and he would perhaps even tell you that it calls with its mouth closed, like a frog does, with the throat inflating and deflating, acting as a resonating chamber. It is found only in Peninsular India, and nowhere else in the world. This species is not even found in central India, let alone the north.  Then there are others which are nearly global – the Barn Owl  and our ubiquitous Blue Rock Pigeon. Both have gone global along with human beings, and do extremely well wherever we have multi-storeyed buildings. They are essentially birds which roost and breed on ledges in cuttings and cliffs. For them, our multi-storeyed buildings are similar to the artificial cliffs with ledges to roost and breed on! So, you have a building and you get these birds. 

One would wonder what is happening to the common birds of yesterday: the crows, the sparrows, the pigeons, the doves, the mynas… We still have them in our cities, though they are not found in the same numbers that we used to find them in. Habitat loss, increased number of man-made chemicals in the environment to contend with, noise, have all kept the pressure on. 

There is one thing to remember though. Birds are the highest metabolising powerhouses in the living world. Per unit body weight, they burn up food at a much higher rate than any other animal. That is because, flight requires power. Power to not only take forward, but to fly. So any toxin in the environment affects them earlier than it does to us. If birds suffer, we would not be far behind. Remember the miner's canary that used to be carried down into the mine shaft, until Davy invented his safety lamp? Until we discover a warning device for every chemical that we dump into the environment,  and every habitat that we destroy, we would require birds to sound the alarm.

KRISHNA MB & SUNIL KUMAR M   

September 2008

[Miner' Canary in the Tehelka Magazine]