Narmada Valley dry deciduous forests

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.

A search of the Narmada Valley dry deciduous forests for any observational record at all comes back empty. Not in the last month, not in the last six, not even across two years within the forest's own boundaries. Only when the search radius stretches out to roughly 100 kilometers does anything appear, and what surfaces then, some 200 sightings, is overwhelmingly moths logged around Pune, Mumbai, Thane, Matheran, Dapoli, and Raigarh. Those are cities and hill stations, not this forest.None of what might be happening here right now, breeding activity, insect emergence, water conditions in the valley's streams, can actually be checked. No water-quality gauge, no compliance record, no conservation group's monitoring appears to reach this particular stretch of forest.It would be a mistake to read the silence as ecological quiet. It's closer to the opposite: a dry deciduous forest in this part of the Deccan has never drawn the kind of casual observation effort that a city full of smartphones and porch lights generates almost as a byproduct. Species like the tiger moths, tussock moths, and underwing moths turning up in the Mumbai and Pune records, groups well represented locally in families such as the Underwing, Tiger, Tussock, and Allied Moths, almost certainly have counterparts moving through these hills right now. There's simply no one nearby recording them.That pattern runs backward from what monitoring should probably look like. Effort should, if anything, track the places with the least human traffic most closely, since those are the places where change goes longest unnoticed. Instead it clusters where the observers already are. Whatever is moving through this valley this month is, for now, simply going undocumented.

Mushrooms have been appearing across the city since late June — Inkcaps, jelly fungi, chalk mushrooms, and several species still under identification have been recorded from Pashan to the Fergusson College campus to Deccan Gymkhana — 19 observation records across 30 days. These are presence records reflecting where observers have been looking, not a measure of abundance, but the variety of taxa turning up across different neighbourhoods does suggest the monsoon fruiting season is well underway.Pleated inkcap (Parasola plicatilis) is among the most ephemeral of all fungi — it pushes through the soil, releases spores, and liquefies within hours. Catching one at all is a matter of being in the right patch at the right moment. Decomposer fungi like these are generally understood to play a key role in cycling nutrients through dry deciduous soils — breaking down accumulated leaf litter and making nutrients available as trees flush new growth — though what is captured here is their surface fruiting, not the underground processes themselves. The monsoon fungal pulse marks the season as surely as the arrival of any migrant bird.

Indian Grey Hornbill sightings on July 18 coincided with peak monsoon fruiting — sacred figs and cluster figs now ripening across the city. The birds are drawn to this abundance not by accident; hornbills and figs have evolved one of the forest's most essential mutualisms — as the birds feed, they disperse seeds far from parent trees, a process that drives forest regeneration across generations.Timing compounds the significance. July marks nesting season for these hornbills, and they shelter in cavities within the same old fig trees that now fruit. A single mature tree becomes both pantry and nursery, sustaining breeding pairs precisely when energy demands peak. The synchrony between fruiting and breeding is no coincidence — it is the ecology that built the forest.

Granite Ghosts (Bradinopyga geminata) arrived at Pashan Lake on July 9, joining over 20 odonate species recorded in the first ten days of the monsoon—a pulse of dragonflies and damselflies triggered by seasonal rains. These small, compact dragonflies breed only in seepage that flows over bare rock, and odonatologists have long used them as a landscape moisture gauge. When Granite Ghosts appear, you know the groundwater has risen all the way to the stone.The diversity this week speaks to the monsoon's power: alongside the Granite Ghosts came Common Picture Wings, Lesser Emperors, Scarlet Skimmers, and species from every dragonfly lineage present here. Ninety-six odonate records in the past forty-five days mark the seasonal transformation from dry-season scarcity to summer abundance. For now, the landscape is wet all the way down.

Four cuckoo species converged here in late June and early July—a striking ecological moment that reveals the precision of brood parasitism timed to monsoon rhythms. Asian Koel, Common Hawk-Cuckoo, Grey-bellied Cuckoo, and Fork-tailed Drongo-Cuckoo were recorded across the region during this brief window. Each species has evolved to time its breeding to match the nesting peak of its specific host birds, a behavioral synchronization refined over millennia.The Hawk-Cuckoo's call—a loud, whistled "brain-fever"—has been a signature of the Deccan monsoon rains for centuries, its arrival marking the start of the wet season in local tradition. This year it shared the stage with three companions, each pursuing the same parasitic strategy but targeting different host species. The simultaneous presence of all four speaks to the robustness of the monsoon pulse itself, the surge of insect availability and nesting activity that draws these specialized brood parasites to the region year after year.

The coast is already rising. Monsoon winds are pushing water inland days before the rains arrive — the tide stands nearly 10 centimeters above its predicted level, flooding the intertidal zone longer than the spawning rhythms of fish have tuned to expect. Local fisherfolk recognize the signal at once: it is time to pause, to let the sea move through its own cycles undisturbed.Over the past two months, more than 200 observations across 121 taxa have been logged from this coastal reach. Eucalyptus dominates the tallied records, a reflection of the introduced plantings that now make up nearly a quarter of the observable flora here. Among them are native species — trees, birds, insects, and herbs bound to the region's ecological history — but the landscape they inhabit is increasingly composed of species brought from elsewhere. The rhythm of the tides waits for no arbor; the question is whether the creatures that depend on that rhythm can adapt quickly enough.

Over the past two months, forty-two butterfly species have turned up across the city's green patches — a striking diversity that speaks to pockets of refuge persisting even as development accelerates. Among them was a sighting of the Crimson Rose (Pachliopta hector), a protected species typically found in more open countryside, on June 7 — a reminder that urban butterfly populations can include species of regional conservation concern.That same month, an Ashoka tree (Saraca asoca) came into flower on June 24 — a species planted at temples for millennia across the region, and now threatened by bark harvest for traditional medicine. The persistence of both the butterfly and the tree here, however precarious, suggests that intentional conservation and habitat preservation within an expanding city can still matter.

The air over Narayan Peth sits heavy and bright in the middle of summer. In the gardens and along the roadsides, wherever a citrus tree grows, look closely at the leaves. Near the tips of young shoots, on the smooth upper surface of a single leaf, you may find a pale yellow egg, about the size of a pinhead, sitting alone. It was placed there by a lime swallowtail, and it is the beginning of a new generation.The lime swallowtail is one of the most widespread butterflies in this part of the world. It is a large butterfly, with yellow and black patterning across its wings and a distinctive dark band running through them. In flight it moves with a loose, unhurried wingbeat, and it is often seen in gardens, around flowering shrubs, or drifting along tree lines. But in early summer, the females are doing something more deliberate. They are searching for citrus. Lime, lemon, orange, curry leaf, and the native bengal quince all belong to the same plant family, and all carry the chemical compounds the lime swallowtail needs. A female will land on a young leaf, press her forelegs against the surface, and taste it. She is checking for the right volatile compounds before she commits to laying. If the leaf passes, she curves her abdomen and deposits a single egg, then moves on to the next plant. She will lay dozens of eggs this way, spreading them across different plants rather than concentrating them in one place.The timing matters. Young, actively growing leaves are softer and have lower concentrations of the defensive compounds that older leaves accumulate over time. A caterpillar hatching on a mature leaf faces tougher tissue and stronger chemistry. On a new flush of growth, it has a better start. Summer in Narayan Peth brings heat and, in many gardens, irrigation, which keeps citrus pushing out new leaves even when the rains have not yet arrived in full. The butterfly is tracking that growth. The caterpillars that hatch will go through several distinct stages. Early instars are dark and mottled, resembling bird droppings on a leaf surface. Later instars turn green, matching the leaf they rest on. Both are forms of concealment, but they work differently at different sizes. The caterpillar also carries a structure behind its head called an osmeterium, a forked orange gland that it can extend when threatened, releasing a sharp, unpleasant smell. It is a last resort, but it works against some predators.The lime swallowtail does not live in isolation here. The common mormon swallowtail uses the same citrus host plants, and both species can be found laying on the same trees during the same weeks. There is overlap but not direct competition in the strict sense: each female is selecting individual leaves, and a tree in active growth produces enough new foliage to support both. The shikra, a small hawk present in this area, takes large insects and could take a butterfly on the wing, though the swallowtail's erratic flight makes it a difficult target. More consistent pressure comes from birds like the greater coucal, which moves through dense vegetation and is capable of taking caterpillars from foliage. This is part of why the egg-scattering behavior matters. A female that lays all her eggs on one plant loses everything if a forager works that plant thoroughly. Distributed eggs mean distributed risk.The plain tiger butterfly and the lemon migrant are also moving through gardens right now, each tied to different host plants, each running its own cycle through the heat. The lime swallowtail's cycle is simply the one written on citrus leaves. If there is a citrus tree near you, or a curry leaf plant in a pot, run your eye over the youngest leaves at the growing tips. The egg, if it is there, will catch the light slightly differently from the leaf surface around it, a small pale dome sitting on green.