Wildlife In All Its Glory, While We Were In Lockdown

When the Covid-19 pandemic started, we thought it would last a month more. ‘A month more’, ‘two additional weeks’, ‘mid-July will be a good time to restart life’ were the sort of thoughts we shared on messages and now-so-frequent video calls. When you live in a city, you admire the warm-blooded plans you can make in the centre of activity a metropolis tends to be – a last-minute concert, a foreign film screening, meeting friends with long working hours in the dead of the night. But life in the city is also about how often you can get away from it – a quiet nip to the mountains, or heading out of the country even with minimal account balance, when the international airport is as close as the domestic one.

Coronavirus took away the latter. City life in 2020 was going to be all about the urban space, locked in our houses, with no travel-escapes in sight. As the pandemic spread, I would look at a Semal tree that I could see from my house. The tree had lush, scarlet blossoms, and all manner of birds would feast on them.

It will be over soon, I would tell myself. Soon, the disease would vanish as many peculiar diseases are wont to do, and I would be able to go for a walk under the tree, instead of just admiring it from afar. I took pictures each March morning. The Semal dropped all its annual flowers, but coronavirus was not going anywhere.

I watched the sky, recording rainbows in between the monsoon, Jupiter and its moons which were close to Earth after the monsoon, and rare blue-sky days throughout the lockdown. The vastness of the sky was a substitute for being able to travel.

In April, I waited for the cycle of reverse migration – flocks of Rosy Starlings coming to Delhi from their winter stint in South India, on their way to their breeding grounds in Central Asia or Europe. As the starlings alighted on the Semal, the flowers had already turned to dust. For the first time in years, I could not follow them on their Spring exploits in the city’s parks, forests, open spaces, and Peepal fig trees.

And during the lockdown, more and more people turned to wildlife. In the United States, birdwatching records contributed by citizens on popular platform E-bird saw a 30 percent increase, while citizen science data on nest-watching saw a forty percent increase. In India, Big Butterfly Month—an event to record wild butterflies—saw over 20,000 citizen science records being contributed. Those who participated usually tended to be people from all walks of life, taking short neighbourhood strolls to record wild butterflies around them. Around the same time, a first of its kind attempt to vote for a National butterfly was also held – polling a neat 60,000 votes.

While I too had taken short walks in nearby green spaces – which was the only sense of ‘going anywhere’ during the pandemic – my first real escape was to Basai wetland, across a state border, in Haryana in October. The area is not identified as a wetland by the state, but that has not deterred birdwatchers from cherishing this amazing site, which gets over 250 bird species. The wetland spreads itself with birds and aquatic vegetation, even as people eye the area for real estate.

As the city of Gurgaon springs around Basai, birdwatchers went to court to save the site from destruction, which is not just a water recharging spot and bird habitat, but also an open space.

A similar story plays out for many wetlands across India – dogged personal interest and follow-ups are needed to preserve these sites. Recently, the National Green Tribunal directed all states to report on wetlands and their status. In a separate case, the NGT actually asked for the demolition of skywalks and construction over the historic Dhampur lake in Sindhudurg.

When I went to Basai in October, the wetland was struggling – with the erection of a new construction and waste demolition plant in the wetland. Yet, there was something else in the air- a yellow and grey bird, the Citrine Wagtail.

The Wagtail migrates to India each year from wet areas in Palearctic regions, Baluchistan or Himalayas, traveling long and tiring distances to come South. It then finds itself in neglected wetlands like Basai – invaluable spots for an exhausted little bird. At the same site, a brilliant Red Munia bird, coloured something like a strawberry, searched for nesting material. Busy Coots and iridescent Purple Swamphens swam in the water.

A Prinia, a small, grass-loving bird, pranced on reeds. A Blue-tailed Bee-eater, also a migrant, whooshed through the sky, crying out excitedly as it hunted dragonflies.

The year had gone to hell, but I had seen my first migratory birds. From the Rosy Starlings I could not follow in March, to the Citrine Wagtail I saw next to a wetland surrounded by hulking high rises, at least one thing was working – the great magic of migration. Closer home, Silk floss trees were smothered in autumnal blossoms at roundabouts, raided by gleeful Purple sunbirds.

In my garden, butterflies came to rest on leaves and feed on flowers. It has been a year of loss, but the trees are full of life.

This is the very essence of living –flowers bloom through the most pitiful times. And in the places we call home, the bleak is often adjacent to the beautiful.

Neha Sinha works with the Bombay Natural History Society. Views expressed are personal.

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of BloombergQuint or its editorial team.