It’s 7pm on a Saturday night and a park in the heart of the city is teeming with people. The pathways are crammed with jostling walkers, park benches are spilling over with couples and senior citizens. In all the bustle, a group of people carefully trail the walkway armed with torches that they shine across the park’s treetops. They’re looking for something. They find ant nests, a spotted owlet and bats hanging upside down – but they keep moving. They reach the end of the park’s walkway and a swathe of light from a torch hits a tall tree outside the park boundary. A pair of eyes glowing in the dark stare back and begin floating in the dark. They’ve found what they’re looking for – a small and extremely elusive furry creature – a slender loris. With wide, unblinking eyes and long, skinny limbs, these peculiar squirrel-sized primates live on trees in the forests of southern India and Sri Lanka.

But the park where the group spots the loris is far from a pristine forest. The roundabout next to it is clogged with traffic, drowned in a cacophony of horns and city noises. Bangalore, known as India’s Silicon Valley, is one of the world’s fastest-growing cities with a population of 10 million.



And yet, somehow, the lorises have survived, hidden in the heart of the city despite its relentless urbanisation. Until a few decades ago, the lorises – called Kaddu paapa (forest baby) in the local language of Kannada – were found in parts of the city, including MG Road in Bangalore’s central business district. Snake charmers with lorises in their pockets were a common sight and the lorises were sometimes sold as pets. But lorises were thought to have disappeared from the inner city as jackals and mongooses had. Today, few know what a slender loris is, let alone that the peculiar looking animal could be sharing their neighbourhood.

Volunteers from the Urban Slender Loris Project on a night survey. Photograph: Ashok Hallur

But a citizen science mission has brought the spotlight on these hidden lorises for the first time. The Urban Slender Loris Project (USLP), with its local volunteers, has been surveying the city for the last six months investigating urban lorises. With absolutely no data to fall back on, they had to begin from scratch. Their first goal was to assess where the lorises had survived. They divided the city into 5 sq km grids and acquired the necessary permissions to scrutinise after dark public green spaces (such as parks, lakes, institution campuses), as well as residential areas and other possible loris habitats. One hundred and fifty Bangaloreans have volunteered in 26 night trails. There have been 61 loris sightings.

Kaberi Kar Gupta, the principal scientist behind USLP has studied slender lorises in the wild for a decade. In 2013, Gupta and some wildlife experts looked for lorises in a city university campus and were rather surprised. “They were everywhere. Their density was much higher than what I saw when I did my PhD,” she recalls. The reason slender lorises are here is because the city falls in the natural distribution zone of the animal. “You would expect them here, but we didn’t expect they could be living inside the city, especially with the way Bangalore has been growing in the past 20 years,” she adds.



The lives of Bangalore’s lorises are shrouded in mystery. Even in the wild, these curious primates have not been studied much. Gupta’s research in the forests of Tamil Nadu is the only radio-collared study of slender lorises. Weighing around 200g or less, these small creatures are hard to spot. They are arboreal and nocturnal, foraging for tiny fruits and insects. It is perhaps these characteristics that have helped the loris stay out of sight even in a big city.

Snake charmers with lorises in their pockets were once a common sight in Bangalore

A slender loris spotted in Bangalore. Video by Adarsh Raju

The USLP team have encountered odd behaviour in the urban loris. While slender lorises are usually found perched at an average height of 5 metres, the city lorises were seen a greater height. “They’re probably avoiding disturbance from human activities and using Bangalore’s availability of large trees,” explains Padma Ashok, a core volunteer in the project. Lorises have also been spotted on unusual plants such as bougainvillea and two rare sightings on a coconut tree and a Christmas tree were reported. These shy mammals have even been spotted near lamp-posts catching moths that were attracted by the light.

The presence of lorises, as an indicator species, suggests the presence of other creatures in the ecosystem – and, accordingly, the USLP has also recorded frogs, snakes, birds, insects and other mammals on its walks. But the lorises have very specific ecological requirements and are therefore picky about their homes. “They need continuous horizontal tree canopy to move along treetops, and they prefer small branches that they can hold with their slender limbs,” explains Gupta. They don’t sleep in nests or tree holes and, because of the way they sleep – they roll up, tuck in their heads and sleep in the canopy thickets – they need very specific sleeping sites. “Given these very particular needs,” Gupta adds, “how is it they survive in a city?”

Without connected tree canopy, slender lorises can’t move from one green patch to another. “Bangalore, like many large cities, has patchy green cover, but continuous canopy is particularly important for mobile species such as lorises, bats and butterflies. It’s also critical for their genetic viability in the long term,” says urban ecologist Harini Nagendra.

Lorises need continuous horizontal tree canopy to move along treetops. Photograph: Angad Achappa

Until a decade ago, many city roads were buried under the cooling shade of avenue trees that overlapped and kept treetops connected. These not only provided food and shelter, but were midway points for species moving between habitats in the city – especially crucial for canopy creatures such as lorises.

In the past decade, Bangalore – once famous as India’s “garden city” for its green spaces – has lost most of its trees. According to an estimate by the Environmental Support Group (ESG), a Bangalore based NGO, 50,000 trees were felled to widen a series of streets in the late 2000s. Between 2011 and 2014, 9,281 trees were felled for the city’s metro and other road-widening projects. The city’s peri-urban outskirts – once full of orchards – have also lost hundreds of thousands of trees to allow for the expansion of a city whose 47% growth rate between 2001 and 2011 was the highest in India.

“The orchards were connected to inner-city parks and open spaces through avenue trees, and served as wildlife corridors,” explains Leo Saldana of ESG. “This isn’t merely an aesthetic or environmental loss, but has been ecologically disastrous with an irreplaceable loss of biodiversity,” he says.

In April, citizens from the USLP spotted five slender lorises in a small city forest adjoining one of Bangalore’s busiest roads. The green patch is being developed as a city park and the felling of trees for a walkway has begun.

While development is essential for a city, Gupta recommends that developers and city authorities work with environmental experts for solutions. “Urban areas are not sterile; they can create refuge for wildlife. But, unlike protected areas, in cities the pressures are too many,” she says.

Slender lorises are an endangered species accorded the highest protection under Indian law. While they continue to be threatened by poaching for superstition and the illegal pet trade, the gravest danger they face in a city is habitat destruction. For how much longer can Bangalore have these rare creatures? “That really depends on whether we can co-exist,” says Gupta. “I believe we can.”