Malabar Coast moist forests

A Malabar Sacred Langur (*Semnopithecus hypoleucos*) has turned up twice in the past month among the residential buildings of Jogeshwari West, on August 27 and again on September 2. The two spots are less than a kilometre apart and roughly three and a half kilometres from the Aarey forest and the boundary of Sanjay Gandhi National Park. This is a slim, long-limbed monkey with a long tail and long, silky fur that runs from cream through pale grey, sometimes with a wash of orange. The face is a black triangle, the ears are black, and the hands and feet are black against the pale body; the name black-footed gray langur comes from that contrast. The monkey Mumbai residents see far more often is the bonnet macaque, and the two are easy to separate. The macaque is stockier and grey-brown, with a bare pink face and a mop of centre-parted hair on the crown, and it spends much of its day on the ground picking up whatever it finds: fruit, leaves, insects, lizards, the odd egg. The langur stays mostly in the canopy and eats leaves. Telling this langur from the northern plains gray langur of central and northern India is harder, since the two were treated as a single species until recently and share the same build and grey coat. The differences are the darkness of the hands and feet and, above all, geography. From the Tapti River southward along the Western Ghats and the west coast, through Maharashtra, Goa and Karnataka into Kerala, the grey langur is this one. Leaves are a poor food. Mature foliage is mostly cellulose, which no mammal can digest on its own, and a fruit-eater's gut would pass it through nearly untouched. Langurs get around this with a greatly enlarged stomach divided into chambers, where bacteria ferment the leaf mass before it moves on, much as a cow's rumen does. That gut lets a langur live on foliage that macaques and most other primates cannot use, with fruit and flowers taken when they come into season. It forages mainly in the trees but does come down to the forest floor. Young males leave the troop they were born into when they mature and join or form bachelor groups of non-breeding males. Mid-September, at the tail of the monsoon, is when Mumbai's canopy is at its fullest. Terminalia is carrying its tender new leaf flush, copperpod is in flower and setting pod, tamarind is ripening, and the peepal and banyan figs have finished their leaf flush and are heading toward a fruiting pulse that runs from October into December. For a leaf-eater, this is the month with the most to eat. The species belongs to moist deciduous and riverside forest, sacred groves and gardens, mostly between about 100 and 1,200 metres. The two sightings are presence records and say nothing about how many langurs use the Jogeshwari edge or how often. What they do show is a grey monkey with black hands, a black face and a long tail sitting in a canopy a few kilometres out from Aarey, and anyone who sees one here now knows what it is and what it is doing up there.

An Indian Skimmer (*Rynchops albicollis*) has been working the Dharamtar Creek estuary at Mlrapada, on the Raigad shore south of Uran. Four separate reports have come in there since August 22, 2026, with a high count of 1 on every visit, so this is most likely a single bird being re-found on successive trips out. The skimmer is built around one trick. Its lower mandible is noticeably longer than the upper, thin and blade-like, and the bird feeds by flying just above calm water with that lower blade slicing the surface. When the blade touches a fish, the head snaps down and the bill closes on it in a fraction of a second, without the bird ever breaking stride. It hunts by touch rather than sight, which lets it work at dusk and into the night when small fish rise to the surface film. Sheltered creek water at slack tide, like the channels between the mangroves and mudflats at Dharamtar, is exactly the kind of flat surface the method needs; it does not work in chop. Recognizing one among the terns is straightforward once the bill is seen. It is tern-sized with long, narrow wings and a black cap running down the back and upperwing, white below and across the forehead. The bill is thick, orange-red and tipped yellow, and the lower half visibly overshoots the upper. In flight the wingbeats are slow and deep for a bird this size, and it holds low over the water rather than hovering and plunging the way terns do. Skimmers are river birds for most of the year. They breed in the dry season on open sandbars of the big north Indian rivers, the Chambal and the Ganga chief among them, laying in a scrape in bare sand before the monsoon comes up and floods the bars. Once the young are flying and the rivers rise, the birds scatter, and some reach the tidal creeks and estuaries of the west coast. A bird at Dharamtar in the last week of August fits that post-breeding movement, arriving as the monsoon eases and the creek water settles. The species is listed as Endangered; nesting sandbars are lost to dams, sand mining, and the pressure of people and livestock on the few rivers that still run free enough to build them. Dharamtar Creek offers the other half of the year: quiet tidal water, mudflats full of small fish, and mangrove edges to roost against. Anyone birding the Uran and Rewas shoreline this month should scan the low flyers over the creek at first and last light.

Mumbai's fragmented green refuges have a persistent, uninvited resident. The African Giant Snail has been logged 12 times in the past 30 days and 48 times over the past year within protected and semi-protected green spaces bordering the Malabar Coast moist forests, with sightings recurring at the same key sites: Aarey Milk Colony, Mahim Nature Park in Dharavi, and Malabar Hill itself. Records show up nearly every month, three to eight a month, rather than clustering in one burst, which points to an established population rather than snails that wandered in and died out. This species, native to East Africa, is one of the most widely spread invasive land snails in the world, and it earns that reputation by being a generalist that eats through native seedlings and understory plants, competes directly with smaller native mollusks for food and space, and can carry parasites, including the rat lungworm nematode, that pose a real risk to anyone handling them or eating unwashed produce from infested gardens. In a city where these three sites are already squeezed to a fraction of what once bordered the Malabar Coast forests, a slow-breeding native plant community has little room to absorb sustained grazing pressure from a snail that can lay hundreds of eggs a year and shows no sign of dying back on its own. None of this shows the population is spreading beyond these sites or getting worse year over year, since recurring sightings can also just mean more people are looking. What the record does show is that the snail is no longer a passing curiosity at Aarey, Mahim, or Malabar Hill. It's a fixture.