Category: Urban Fauna
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Plight of Granivorous Birds in Urban Landscapes
Shashank Bhardwaj Introduction When people talk about House Sparrow, it reminds me of my vivid childhood memories in Delhi. I remember sitting with my mother in the open veranda in the scorching heat of summer, helping her with household chores like cleaning, and storing wheat grains. At times, my mother would get occupied with other…
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Locust In The City
Vijaylakshmi Suman The rise of the pandemic resulted in people being confined to their homes for months. Since then, a lot of news has emerged where people in the city had witnessed instances of ‘reclamation by nature’. For some, it was a sign of reclamation and recovery, while some quoted this as an absence of…
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Quarantine Ecologies: The Spectacular Return of Animals
Kartik Chugh As the world is reeling from the effects of the pandemic, a barrage of writing has recently emerged linking COVID-19 to the ‘healing’ of Earth. Lockdown measures of confinement have birthed novel ecologies of abandonment which have altered the rhythms and mobilities of both humans and non-humans. The absence of humans has led…
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Lockdown Effects: Conditioning of Stray Dogs to Vehicular Traffic
Fizala Tayebulla Street dogs have become one of the very few animals that us humans could watch and access from our locked-in houses in cities. As humans limited their movement and remained mostly within premises of their homes, commuting in vehicles- a typical urban activity came to a standstill. City roads became unusually quiet and…
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Adaptability of Wetland Birds to Changing Landscapes
Himanshu Choudhery The advent of the industrial revolution paved the way for massive industries and settlements to be set up in new areas, that we now call cities and towns. Due to this, a large number of people from rural areas have settled down in cities in search for employment and a ‘better life’. As…
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Unique Howling Behaviour in Street Dogs
Ajay Immanuel Gonji A few nights ago, while I was in my room, I could hear the faint wail of a siren. In a hurry, I grabbed my camera and headed to the balcony to record what I knew I was about to witness. The siren, which I hear almost every night, is of the…
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Animal Geographies II: A Geographical Perspective
Kartik Chugh In my previous article, I provided a brief introduction to the distinct, lively, and innovative field of Animal Geography. I portrayed how new considerations about how we imagine animals in modern society emerge when we shift the focus towards animals and think of them as subjective participants and active agents who play an…
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Animals in Eco-tainment
Ajay Immanuel Gonji Introduction In a paper by James R. Miller (2005), the author talks about how people in cities, including children, spend very little time in the open, where they are likely to develop an affinity to nature and cognizance to protect and preserve biodiversity. This general apathy among urban citizens towards nature is…
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The Case Against Animal Rights
Kartik Chugh The coronavirus might have been invisible but that there would be a pandemic was not unforeseen. The simple narrative that the virus emerged in animals and jumped the species barrier to reach humans, helps sidestep the realm of human responsibility. At the center of this outbreak is not just the animal, but the…
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The Little Bird Over My Window
Sonali Chauhan During mid-March 2020, academic institutions in Delhi were put under lockdown. A few days later, office work, general discussions, and conversations shifted to online mode. Apart from the pandemic, the conversations were centered around the topic of anxiety and mental stress that may increase due to our current sedentary lifestyle. People are devising…