South Deccan Plateau dry deciduous forests

Two Indian Spotted Eagles have been working Hoskote Kere, the old irrigation tank on the plateau east of Bengaluru, turning up on birders' lists over and over through the second half of August and confirmed there on the last day of the month.Clanga hastata is a medium-sized brown eagle of the Aquila group and one of the more easily missed raptors in southern India. Some of that is taxonomy: it is closely related to the Greater Spotted Eagle and still gets written off as one in the field. Some of it is simply that a large brown eagle on a bare limb over a tank looks, at a glance, like any other large brown eagle. South Asian surveys describe it as globally Vulnerable.What it needs is an edge rather than a forest. Those same surveys describe it as an uncommon resident tied to wetland margins, hunting open ground for small mammals, birds and carrion, and Hoskote Kere has that structure: open water, a grazed and scrubby shoreline, and dry deciduous trees standing tall enough to sit in and watch from. The prey layer is there to match. Indian hare, greater bandicoot-rat, three-striped palm squirrels and unidentified rats have all been logged in that landscape over the past month, along with an Oriental rat snake, a Pondicherry fan-throated lizard, rock dragons, and toads and paddy field frogs after rain. Every one of those is an animal of open ground or the water's edge, which is the point: this eagle hunts things it can see and drop onto, not prey hidden under a canopy.The tanks east of the city were dug and bunded to hold monsoon runoff for irrigation. The habitat is a by-product, and this is one of the birds that lives off it. Anyone going to look should scan the standing trees along the bund rather than the water.

Five casual sightings logged between August 5 and August 12, clustered tightly around Chinnapa Garden and Jayamahal, trace to the same spot: Aquarium Paradise, the large public aquarium that opened this year on Jayamahal Main Road — same postal code (560006), same tight radius as this cluster. One Alligator Gar, one Chinese High-fin Banded Shark, one Chinese Mahseer, and one each of Convict Cichlid and Peacock Cichlid were photographed within a few hundred meters of each other — the footprint of an aquarium built to house over 100 exotic species, including sharks and rays. None of these species are native to South Deccan streams or tanks, but none of them are loose in a waterway either: this reads like an aquarium's exhibit tanks, not five separate home aquarium owners clustered in one residential pocket, and it isn't a release.The gar is still worth knowing about even as an exhibit animal. It's a large ambush predator native to the slow-moving rivers and bayous of the southern United States and Mexico, capable of growing well past a meter and easily outliving a typical home tank. Fish like this are common casualties of the aquarium trade when kept privately — owners who can't keep up with their size sometimes release them into local waterways instead of finding them another home. That risk applies far less to a maintained public exhibit, but it's a reminder of what a fish like this can do if it ever does end up loose nearby.Bengaluru's lakes and seasonal channels are interconnected enough that a release anywhere in this area could eventually reach water bodies closer to the South Deccan Plateau dry deciduous forests reserve itself. There's no indication any of these five fish are anywhere but in the aquarium's tanks, and no water-quality or protected-land monitoring data suggesting a release has occurred. Still, it's worth watching whether similar species start turning up loose in lakes or streams nearer the reserve.

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.