Tag: Urban Wildlife

  • Early Birders get to Learn!: Birding at Dheerpur Wetlands with the CUES Team

    Early Birders get to Learn!: Birding at Dheerpur Wetlands with the CUES Team

    That eagle you spotted in Delhi is probably a Black kite, and that parrot might be a Parakeet! Welcome to the world of birdwatching with the first semester students of MAED, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University, who visited the Dheerpur Wetlands and learnt about restoration ecology, urban wetlands, and the surprising biodiversity of cities.

    Read more

  • Cities – Far Away from Nature?

    Cities – Far Away from Nature?

    Global populations continue to urbanise at an unprecedented rate, with cities expanding into huge concentrations of concrete, steel, and glass, raising sustainability concerns. I’ve attempted to explore this issue from the standpoint of urban ecology, an interdisciplinary branch of study that looks at the complex interactions between the built environment of cities and non-human species.

    Read more

  • Beautiful Dragonflies of the Not-so-Beautiful City

    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?

    Read more

  • Bats: The Night Workers

    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…

    Read more

  • Out of Place and Out of Space – Translocation and the Urban Monkey

    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…

    Read more

  • Disciplining Non-human Bodies in the City

    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…

    Read more

  • Life in the Fastlane: Roadkill in the Anthropocene

    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…

    Read more

  • Exploring the Behaviour of Urban Wildlife

    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…

    Read more

  • Entangled Spaces: Lime Swallowtail in my Urban Garden

    Entangled Spaces: Lime Swallowtail in my Urban Garden

    Kartik Chugh Spending almost all the time at home in the past month and a half, I’ve learned to appreciate my surroundings better. I’m finding little joys in watching birds landing on my terrace to quench their thirst, a troop of macaques negotiating the urban infrastructure, and occasional butterflies that stop by my urban garden.…

    Read more

  • Birding from my Balcony

    Birding from my Balcony

    Ajay Immanuel Gonji Growing up as a child, I loved animals and birds. One of my first experiences watching animals was when my dad would take me around our neighbourhood on the scooter showing me cows and buffaloes. At home, the pets I grew up with included fishes, ducks, chickens, rabbits, dogs, mynas, pigeons, parakeets…

    Read more