What’s the link between conservation and a casual nature walk in the city?

As urban ecology and citizen science garner growing interest around the world, meet the nature-lovers showing us a wilder side of urban India 

On any evening, Mumbai’s Bandstand Promenade is thronged by crowds from all over the city. They walk, jog, lounge, wait for the sun to set, or for their beloved Bollywood superstar to emerge from their giant gated bungalows. Unknown to most, a few metres down this rocky beach, the world’s oldest life form thrives quietly. “These are sea sponges, they have no nervous system,” says marine biologist Gaurav Patil, as he points at a small dull white rubbery grove growing under a rock, not unlike an anthill, with holes in their peaks. This is one of thousands of species that date back over 500 million years; it is so ubiquitous that it has been harvested as a bath product for centuries, and is now regaining popularity as a biodegradable or sustainable alternative to loofahs. 

It’s low tide on a Saturday evening. Patil—part of the team at Coastal Conservation Foundation of India (CCF) which organises the wildly popular Marine Life of Mumbai (MLOM) shore walks—is leading one such group closer to the Arabian Sea. On the way, he guides our eye downwards into the pools and crevasses of these black rocks. Among other things, we spot rock crabs, triton snails, the Anjuna anemone, barnacles and shrubs of brown algae. From the occasional squirt of water appearing mid-air like a single fountain, Patil can tell there are clams swimming in one such pool in the distance. A blue line grouper caught by a fisherman frolics in a pool, and changes its colour from blue to brown in a blink when it senses danger. 

Patil also points out a stray young mangrove tree and the girdled horn snail; neither of which is native to this habitat. “Their presence is a sign that this beach is transforming from a rocky to a muddy one,” he says, adding that the immense scale of construction has a part to play in this morphosis. For him and the CCF team—founded in 2019 by Shaunak Modi and Pradip Patade as a multi-faceted initiative to protect and conserve coastal and marine environments—tracking and communicating this sort of change in Mumbai’s intertidal zones is of paramount importance. A walk on the shore during low tide is just the ticket to do it. 

Hidden in plain sight

Public interest in nature walks, believes Manini Bansal of Bengaluru-based Cafe Oikos, cropped up during the pandemic. “With so little to do, and nowhere to go, non-scientific people began to notice and observe more,” she says. At the same time, there seems to have been a sudden spike in the number of individuals that are organising them, all over India. But instead of caravans into the great unknown, these are more like walks around the block, the neighbourhood, the streets that we pedal daily, to see a city teeming with the abundance of natural life that usually goes unnoticed. 

Meanwhile, dendrophiles can sign up for walks with Sananda Mukhopadhyay in Mumbai, Kavita Prakash’s The Sausage Tree Nature Walks in New Delhi, and Aswathi Jerome’s Trees of Cochin in Kochi. In Goa, Terra Conscious’ Puja Mitra and Roshan Gonsalves take groups out on boat tours to highlight the marine biodiversity of Chapora Bay. The Thane Creek Flamingo Sanctuary in Mumbai’s Airoli district has become a major destination for flamingos and city ’grammers alike. Their guides, trained at the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS), are as fluent in the habits of these great pink migratory birds as they are in everything else that breathes within this rich mangrove cover.

All of these operate on the axis of leisure activity, urban ecology (a field of study that began growing internationally as recently as the 1970s), conservation (of habitats and ecosystems, not just the endangered “glorified” species), and citizen science (a vast area where citizens can participate in furthering the study of natural environments).  

Iterations aplenty 

In Bengaluru, Cafe Oikos is run by a five-member team, also including the founders Anisha Jayadevan and Shishir Rao, along with Ishika Ramakrishna and Janhavi Rajan—whose day jobs are all within the realm of science and conservation. Working pro bono on Cafe Oikos, they have been organising popular public talks by scientists and researchers in the city’s clubs, cafes and bars since 2017. “Our goal has been to communicate conservation to a larger audience,” says Bansal, who was formerly the art director at the wildlife magazine Current Conservation. “We ensure that these presentations are engaging and interactive.” 

In Cafe Oikos’ latest project, a new illustrated “urban ecology book for kids” called The Living Museum (out now on the independent press Champaca Books), a jumping spider takes the reader on a nature trail to notice the critters and creatures that live inside your house, in your garden, on the street and in the night time. You’d meet the bagworm or the “master architect”, leaf-cutter bees that punch neat holes into leaves to build their nests, the black soldier fly that grows up in your compost. 

“We have wanted people to not have the urge to go to a beach or the mountains to explore wildlife,” says Bansal. “We are constantly supporting and talking about the wildlife that’s found in the everyday. Because it’s in a city, people lose that connection. Our association with wildlife is elephants, tigers, sharks. To break that kind of stereotype of wildlife, we constantly urge people to observe what’s living in their own backyard.”

The importance of the backyard became clear to New Delhi-based naturalist and nature educator Abhishek Gulshan during the pandemic. “Back in 2020, when the lockdown hit us, I was never bored because I could just stand on my balcony and look at things,” Gulshan laughs. “I realised during that time that common plants in Indian households are host to butterflies, like the kadhi patta is to the common mormon.” It’s when he started writing a (now discontinued) column for The Hindu, called In My Backyard. Later, his outfit Ninox-Owl About Nature became one of the first partners of BNHS’s annual Butterfly Month event.

Gulshan gave up a plush job in the corporate sector in 2013 to pursue naturalism, specifically birding, more seriously. In 2017, after years of being in the field, stalking the grounds of wildlife sanctuaries like Asola Bhatti in the capital city with his binoculars, and a year with WWF, he launched Ninox-Owl About Nature so he could curate trails and walks with a shade more flexibility. “I take these groups into non-gated areas, I hold fruit-tasting sessions, giving them ber and karaunda,” things that are usually not done for safety reasons. Gulshan, who has found solutions by building relationships with the locals who live in the areas in which he conducts walks, does this because “birds and animals don’t know boundaries.” 

Gulshan’s focus is on habitats to educate the “community” he’s building on the preferences and behaviour of wildlife, but also how degradation happens and the interconnectedness of it all. The Delhi-NCR region has a diversity of wetlands, grasslands, forests. The Aravalli range alone—now a region of prime importance in the development vs protection debate—has a multitude of them, he says. “Just because it looks brown from a distance, doesn’t mean there’s no life there.”

A walk through Mangar in the Aravallis on a winter morning can bring rewarding sights. “You’ll often see the migratory common kestrel (a type of falcon); the white-throated fantail; the titoni which camouflages itself very well against the acacia trees,” shares Gulshan. “And there are all kinds of trees. The kair, for example, does not have leaves. They turn into thorns, which is the case with most trees in the Aravallis due to water shortage. That tree plays host to two types of butterflies, the pioneer and the common gull butterfly. Caterpillars usually feast on leaves, right? But these were feeding on the soft thorns, right around the time they came out of their eggs. Nature is like that. It only takes a little bit of keen observation to see it.”

“We want people to understand that the joy of observing is one thing,” says Bansal, “but also that they can then partake in science.” This is where online crowd-sourced platforms like iNaturalist, Season Watch (for trees), Merlin and eBird (for birds) come into play. “Once people get the hang of basic observation, a simple entry on iNaturalist will not take time. In a larger network of things, it adds to the data of, say, population, density, which area, what species.” It’s this consolidated information that can work as a critical tool when it comes to supporting activists and organisations that might be waging legal battles to protect and preserve delicate ecosystems from the debilitating waves of development sweeping across the country right now. 

The debate on eco-tourism

Then there’s the matter of eco-tourism—an aspect of Indian tourism that is gaining momentum, with thousands making a beeline for sanctuaries, national parks and reserves—and which Bansal and Gulshan both agree is beneficial for conservation as long as “it’s done correctly”. “The tiger is alive because of this today,” says Gulshan, “which wouldn’t have been the case if the government hadn’t seen an incentive.” 

Last year, Ninox conducted its first tour to Ajmer for birders hoping to capture the Lesser Florican, which visits during the monsoon season. They held sessions with farmers to understand the Florican’s behaviour more fully; their own problems and challenges. “The subject is the most important. The land, the bird is more important than any photo you can click of them,” says Gulshan.

“I’d rather go on a MLOM walk than sit in one of 70 jeeps chasing a tiger,” says Bansal. Cafe Oikos recently held its first walk in Cubbon Park in Bengaluru, where Ramakrishna and Rajan pointed out life that lives under a leaf litter, or grows on the bark of trees. “Shifting perspective from the typically magnificent creatures to the smaller, closer ones is necessary.” 

Driven by pure passion and unbridled fascination, these naturalists’ ultimate goal is to trigger more conversations about conservation or, at the very least, to spark curiosity. Of course, there are some philosophical ramifications—being present, beating boredom sustainably—embedded into this activity. But the hope is that the thrill of discovery can lead to a more “conservation-oriented path in the future,” says Gulshan. “No place should be disregarded without being explored first.”

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