Category: Urban Fauna
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Beautiful Dragonflies of the Not-so-Beautiful City
This article investigates dragonflies in the city. While they are specialists in flight, very little is known about their pre-metamorphosis aquatic life. Since urban areas create niches where multi-habitat creatures like dragonflies can flourish, should cities be chastised as unwise, unsustainable endeavours or can they be reimagined as housing nature in changed forms?
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Bats: The Night Workers
Shiwani As the sun goes down, the nightwalker, or rather, I would say, night fliers come out, one can see colonies of bats flying in the sky and sometimes wandering near a tree or plant. On one such night, as I stood on the balcony, sipping a cup of tea, I observed some bats visiting…
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Out of Place and Out of Space – Translocation and the Urban Monkey
Aditi Dhillon This year, in June 2021, the Karnataka High Court passed a judgement according to which monkeys entering residential spaces were to be translocated and moved to their natural habitat by the state. This judgement, however, was not one of its kind. It was, in fact, along the lines of a judgement passed by…
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Disciplining Non-human Bodies in the City
Aditi Dhillon & Ajay Immanuel Gonji In his seminal essay Why Look at Animals? John Berger (2009) talks about how, in the past, people kept domestic animals because they were useful to them – as guard dogs, hunting dogs, mice-killing cats, and so on. Later, people began to keep animals regardless of their usefulness, a…
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Butterflies in the city of Delhi
Photographed and curated by Fizala Tayebulla and Shiwani The Photo Essay is a combined effort of CUES team members. The butterflies have been documented mostly in months of October and November across Dheerpur Wetland Park, Malcha Mahal and Pusa Hill Forest in Central Ridge Forest, New Delhi. The identification of the following Lepidoptera species is…
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Snakes in the City
Vipin and Sonali At the turn of five years of untiring efforts towards restoring a wetland at Dheerpur village, now recognized as the Dheerpur Wetland Park (Project Site) has finally started to show the fruits of labour. Besides numerous flora (48 tree species), several species of grasses and sedge and a significant variety of fauna (birds, amphibians,…
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Valuing Insects
Ajay Immanuel Gonji Recently, I had the opportunity to go into the field with my colleague, Ojit, an entomologist by training. While Ojit was observing the mating behaviour of dragonflies, I was extremely fascinated with the eyes of the insect. And so, I inquired about vision in insects. Ojit informed me that insects, like the…
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Life in the Fastlane: Roadkill in the Anthropocene
Ajay Immanuel Gonji My first close encounter with roadkill was during fieldwork for my Master’s internship, way back in 2013. I remember seeing the bloated body of a large male nilgai, fully intact, on the footpath of the Aruna Asaf Ali Marg – a 6-lane highway bifurcating the Sanjay Van city forest and the Jawaharlal…
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WATER QUALITY OF THE YAMUNA RIVER DURING THE FIRST LOCKDOWN
Divya Mehra and Shiwani The Coronavirus pandemic which has affected almost every part of the world is considered to be the biggest economic and health crisis of the present time. To contain the spread of the Covid-19 disease, in the initial phases of the pandemic, many countries went into lockdown, resulting in the temporary suspension…
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Exploring the Behaviour of Urban Wildlife
Ajay Immanuel Gonji For many of us, our first encounter with animals was probably at home with cats and dogs, or on the streets with cows, chickens and so on. These creatures may be called ‘domestic’ because their lifeworlds almost entirely revolve around human beings. On the other hand are creatures that are collectively referred…