Narmada Valley dry deciduous forests

The Pune Metropolitan Region Development Authority proposed a Rs 500-crore project on October 29, 2026, to reduce sewage pollution across 107 kilometers of the Mula-Mutha river by August 2030. A joint committee report from July 2026 found severe oxygen depletion and organic pollution in the Mula river from untreated sewage discharge, linked to fish deaths. This river is a key wintering habitat for Garganey and other migratory waterfowl that arrive each October.

Oriental Rat Snake was recorded on October 30 in Hinjawadi, Pune. This native species continues active presence in urban and forest-edge habitats of the region through late October.

Indian Garden Lizard was recorded on November 1 in Wakad, Pimpri-Chinchwad. This agamid lizard remains active in urban and suburban habitats through early November in the post-monsoon period.

Red water lily flowered at Mhatoba Mandir Trail, Gokhalenagar on November 3, 2026, a native perennial aquatic herb in peak bloom for the season. Its November-January flowering period corresponds to the dry season when water bodies clear and light penetration to rhizomes increases.

Sharptooth Catfish (Clarias gariepinus) was recorded September 4 at Dhankawadi in a Pune stream. This invasive African catfish impacts native fish and crustaceans through competition and predation.

Bengal Monitor, a threatened species, was recorded on September 19 at Bopgaon. This large terrestrial lizard inhabits dry deciduous forest edges and agricultural lands in the Narmada Valley region.

Indian Cobra was recorded on September 27 in Pune, one of five sightings logged in the past week from the region. This species, a member of India's medically significant venomous snakes, continues presence in urban and forest-edge habitats.

Indian Balloon Frog was recorded calling at Pashan Lake on September 30, a species known for inflating its vocal sac during breeding season. This indicates post-monsoon breeding chorus activity has resumed in this wetland habitat.

Garganey are back on the Mula-Mutha at Kavdi Pat, the stretch of river about fifteen kilometers downstream of Pune where the road from Hadapsar ends in paddy fields at the water. Five were counted there on September 8. They are the first of the wintering ducks to reach this reach of river, and they are on schedule; Garganey (Spatula querquedula) are among the earliest ducks to arrive in India each autumn and among the last to leave, with some staying on peninsular wetlands into May. Anyone going to look for them should not expect the bird on the field guide plate. The drake's white stripe curving from the eye down the back of the head and his pale grey flanks belong to breeding plumage, and he is not wearing it now. After nesting the males moult into a drab eclipse plumage and keep it well into the winter. In September the whole flock reads as streaky brown ducks. The drake keeps a slightly stronger head pattern and a whitish chin, and when he stretches or flies he shows a pale blue-grey forewing. That forewing is the mark. Common Teal, the other small brown duck on this water in autumn, flies on a dark forewing with a green speculum. On the water the Garganey is a little larger than a teal and carries a heavier, all-grey bill. Its head is more strongly striped: a pale eyebrow over a dark eye-stripe, a pale patch at the base of the bill, and a clean whitish throat with no streaking. Indian Spot-billed Ducks share this river all year and are easy to separate, roughly twice the bulk, with a black bill tipped yellow and a red spot at its base. Garganey are dabblers. They feed swimming with the head under, picking from the surface, or upending in water a few inches deep, and they take seeds, pondweed, roots and shoots along with worms, snails, crustaceans and insect larvae. They often feed at night and rest through the day, so a daytime count can miss birds tucked into the reeds. The birds reaching Pune have migrated in from breeding grounds well to the north, arriving early as Garganey typically do. What they find at Kavdi Pat is a low-gradient stretch of river where the channel spreads into shallow pools, sandbars, mudflats and reed beds as the monsoon flow drops. As the river recedes through October and November, the shallows fill with algae, sedge, small fish and insects, and the ducks and waders gather in numbers. Five Garganey in the second week of September is the beginning of that season.

Thirty-five Indian Flying Foxes were counted at a single roost in Satya Sai Nagar, Dhankawadi, in late August, part of a cluster that has held steady across the Kothrud area for the past month. That kind of repeat use, the same handful of canopy trees occupied night after night, is what separates an established colony from bats simply passing through on a foraging circuit. These are among the largest bats in the world, with wingspans stretching past a meter, and they live in a way that looks almost backwards for a bat: by day they hang out in the open, packed into the crowns of tall trees in full view, chattering and jostling for shade and airflow. Only at dusk do they scatter, sometimes traveling many kilometers overnight to feed on soft fruit and flower nectar before returning to the same roost by dawn. Unlike the small insectivorous bats most people picture, flying foxes navigate by sight and smell rather than echolocation, which is part of why they can afford to roost so conspicuously and why colonies like this one are so easy to census from the ground. What almost certainly keeps them anchored to this particular patch of Pune is the fig trees still scattered through its older neighborhoods. Sacred fig, cluster fig, and Indian banyan have all turned up within about a kilometer of the roost cluster in recent weeks, and figs are a flying fox staple across their range. The relationship runs both ways: as the bats commute between roost and fruiting trees, they pass fig seeds through their gut and drop them, intact and viable, far from the parent tree. Fig wasps handle pollination, but it is bats and birds that give fig species their reach, and in a dense urban peth with few other large-bodied fruit-eaters covering that kind of distance, this colony may be doing a disproportionate share of that seed-dispersal work. The roost's location is also its liability. Sacred fig and its relatives are common enough in the area to draw bats into close quarters with dense housing rather than deeper forest cover, and iNaturalist lists the Indian Flying Fox itself as threatened. Roosting over rooftops instead of forest canopy raises the colony's exposure to heat stress on the hottest days, to disturbance from lights and noise, and to the friction that flying fox colonies routinely run into when neighbors object to the smell and droppings under a roost tree. For now it stands as a colony worth simply knowing is there, a working population of a threatened, ecologically useful bat settled in among people who may not realize what it's doing for the neighborhood's fig trees.