A colony of Indian Flying Foxes settles into Kothrud's fig trees
August 31, 2026
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.
Indian Sandalwood's underground dependency and its fatal harvest
September 2, 2026
There is a tree in the dry country around Pune that cannot make a living on its own. Indian Sandalwood ( Santalum album ) was logged here twice last month, on 14 and 23 August, and the interesting thing about it starts underground. Sandalwood is hemi-parasitic: it makes its own sugars in its leaves like any other tree, but draws water and minerals out of the roots of neighbouring plants, tapping into them below the soil. Seedlings in particular need other plants around them to plug into, which is part of why sandalwood has always been difficult to raise in a plantation row and easy to lose when the scrub around it is cleared. The fragrance it is famous for is a heartwood story, not a leaf or flower one. The oil accumulates in the dense inner wood, and that heartwood builds slowly over decades. It also runs down into the roots, which is why the traditional harvest lifts the whole tree out of the ground and distills the root wood along with the trunk. There is no cutting it back and letting it come again. Those two facts together explain the species' predicament: a tree that takes most of a human generation to become worth anything, is worth a great deal the moment it does, and does not survive being harvested. Heavy cutting across its native range in southern India is why wild populations are now considered vulnerable to extinction, and iNaturalist flags the species as threatened.
Late-August blind spot: no eyes on the forest itself
August 16, 2026
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.
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