Leopards in Mumbai, lorises in Bengaluru and raptors in Chennai — in the backyards of our cities the rules of human-animal coexistence are being rewritten

A little before twilight, the supine streets of Borivali, Mulund and Thane Hiranandani turn into the haunt of an unexpected creature from Mumbai’s wild environs: the leopard. By dawn, these discreet predators would have taken down several of their preferred prey — feral dogs — without so much as waking human residents.

Many of the 36 leopards of Sanjay Gandhi National Park (SGNP) in Mumbai’s backyard make a nightly foray into the city only to be detected every now and then by a CCTV. “No, I am not surprised,” says Sunetro Ghosal of volunteer group Mumbaikars for SGNP, formed by the Forest Department to understand the leopard’s behaviour around the park and mitigate man-animal conflict. “As cougars in California, foxes in central London, wolves in Spain, and lions on the edge of Nairobi suggest, landscapes and ecological processes are far more dynamic than we know.”

Divya Gandhi Divya Gandhi

A thousand kilometres away, in the ceaselessly erupting glass and chrome of Bengaluru, ecologist Kaberi Kar Gupta, head-torch donned, looks for the flashing eyes of a shy nocturnal primate amid the foliage. Slender lorises — the rare inhabitants the Western and Eastern Ghats — find a precarious perch in the city’s fast diminishing green pockets. And not surprisingly, the animal has begun to attract the curiosity of scores of ecologists and nature lovers in the city who are now documenting its habitat and behaviour in this unusual metropolitan setting.

Indeed, the unlikely wildlife in our midst — leopards in Mumbai, lorises in Bengaluru and raptors in Chennai — has turned our metros into thriving hubs for research into the behaviour of these animals.

The Urban Slender Loris Project (USLP) that Kar Gupta launched last year harnesses “citizen science”: students, amateur naturalists or just accidental residents of a study site sign up to volunteer their time and labour to add the volume to scientific data that a lone scientist would not be able to gather.

The diminutive primate, the group found, contends not just with habitat loss but also with being trapped or killed for traditional medicine or black magic. The city could have scores of these animals, spread over several pockets both in the city centre and the suburbs, primarily in treed university campuses such as the Indian Institute of Science.

(A slender loris stares out from its perch. Photo: Saravanakumar Salem)

“But the trees are gone in a lot of these areas. There are now only a handful of places that have lorises. It is definitely a resilient species but if we continue our unplanned development we will lose them,” says Kar Gupta, who is Adjunct Assistant professor at California State University.

Conserving urban habitats — unlike wild ones — is quite a different ball game, and involves people, as we are a big part of the ecosystem. “People should have a sense of stewardship over their habitat.” Lorises are a ‘flagship species’ and by conserving them we could save other species linked to its habitat in the city,” says Kar Gupta. More than 300 people — including photographers, IT professionals and homemakers — have joined the USLP, which does surveys, education and outreach programs. “Our goal,” says Kar Gupta, “is to understand the role of biodiversity in urban landscape conservation. And to understand human perceptions on coexisting with nature in our own backyard.”

The leopards of Mumbai meanwhile have attained near-celebrity status with dramatic images of them set against the city’s nightlights published in National Geographic. These carnivores have given researchers new insights about their behaviour in different ecological, social and political contexts, says Ghosal. “This widens our knowledge and feeds back into conservation management.”

While Mumbaikars have indeed been victims of leopard attacks in the past, they are getting increasingly less frequent. The SGNP witnessed an intense episode of human-leopard conflicts in 2003-04 largely because the animals were often trapped and relocated in response to their presence, a phenomenon that stressed them and changed their behaviour, says Ghosal. “There were no fatalities in and around SGNP between 2006 and 2012, after which around seven were recorded between 2012 and 2015. There is increased awareness and the forest department is proactive in responding to any leopard-related calls.”

(Black-winged kites are often found in Chennai's scrublands. Photo:V.Raju)

The group helps if there is a “leopard emergency” but mostly creates awareness about the issue: to reassure residents that mere sightings do not translate into danger; that children are supervised; that people could perhaps play music on mobile phones so that the leopard knows it’s a human approaching and takes care to avoid him and not forming a crowd around it because the animal might panic and attack bystanders. The only-long term solution is to ensure that garbage is disposed of and that no feral dogs are present.

In Chennai, rare raptors have captured the imagination of birders. No less than 35 of the 69 diurnal raptors known from the subcontinent happen to be found around Chennai, says G. Vijaya Kumar, secretary of the Madras Naturalists’ Society, which is now documenting the birds. The group has identified 17 “hotspots” of birds of prey within an arc around Chennai that connects Pazhaverkadu, Koonimedu near Pondicherry and the Ammur Reserve Forest. The grasslands see shaheen falcons, bonelli’s eagles and pied harriers; in the wetland ecosystems are found white-bellied sea eagle and ospreys; in scrublands black-winged kites; and then there are some rare migratory visitors such as the Amur falcon and the greater spotted eagle. “What we hope to do is not just document the species but do something to help conserve their habitats. That’s the key to saving any urban biodiversity.”