South Deccan Plateau dry deciduous forests

Indian Flying Foxes are ranging widely across the city this monsoon, with seven confirmed sightings since June — including a recent record from Chikkabellandur on July 18 — marking one of the more closely watched stretches for this threatened bat in months. We are in peak nursing season now: females are raising their single pup through the rains while colonies forage each night across a broad landscape, a pattern that makes them among the most vital pollinators and seed dispersers in the region's dry forests.Traditional communities here long understood this partnership, maintaining groves of figs and silk-cotton trees near settlements partly to anchor these roosts within useful range of orchards and forest patches. But roost fragmentation poses an acute threat. As large old trees disappear from neighborhoods, colonies are compressed into fewer, more crowded sites — and they become dangerously vulnerable to disturbance during exactly this window when nursing mothers can least afford disruption. The margin between a safe, dispersed roost network and a precarious one is narrowing with each lost tree.

Tasar Silk Moth sightings in Koramangala this week mark part of a broader lepidopteran pulse across the city—35-plus moth and butterfly species have been recorded in the monsoon rains. The caterpillars of the Tasar moth depend on Terminalia and Anogeissus, the classic canopy trees of the original Deccan dry forests, making their appearance in dense urban Bengaluru a telling sign.Finding them here means native tree patches are still ecologically functional—real forest corridors persisting in the city's landscape, not just ornamental relics. Each Tasar caterpillar is a vote of confidence that somewhere among the apartment blocks and roads, the wild bones of this ecosystem are still intact and feeding them.