At a nature camp in Bengaluru’s Cubbon Park, when he was still a young boy, Dr. K.S. Gopi Sundar, now based in Belagavi, had two encounters that would transform his life. While walking through the park he saw the golden oriole for the first time through a pair of binoculars. Till then, he thought that birds like this only existed in the Amazon. Then, a few minutes later, he saw a pair of blue Indian wanderer butterflies.
“My world changed,” says Sundar, who joined Bangalore’s Birdwatchers’ Field Club soon after.
There was no looking back from there for the ecologist, who grew up in Bengaluru. Sundar completed a B.Sc. in Environmental Sciences at St. Joseph’s College (now St. Joseph’s University) and followed it up with a master’s in Ecology at Pondicherry University. In 1998, he began working on the sarus crane, the world’s tallest flying bird, as part of a project with the Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun. “I saw my first sarus on the train on my way there…close to Mathura,” says Sundar, who, some years later, joined the University of Minnesota for a PhD in conservation biology.
Today, Sundar is a National Geographic Explorer, the editor-in-chief of an international journal titled Waterbirds: the International Journal of Waterbird Biology, and the co-chair of the IUCN Stork, Ibis and Spoonbill Specialist Group, and is known for his research on large waterbirds, especially sarus cranes. He serves on several state wildlife boards and court-appointed committees related to conservation in India and has over 100 published papers to his credit.
The most recent is a co-authored paper titled Characteristics of Bird Niches in a Small Indian City: Effects of Migratory Status, Season and Environment Variables published in the Journal of Urban Ecology in September 2024.
In a recent interview with The Hindu in Bengaluru, he spoke about the new study and what he has learnt from his research about the coexistence of birds with humans in India.
One of the things that came through in your recent paper is the need to reassess the assumption that urbanisation automatically leads to a reduction in bird diversity. Can you discuss how the study came about and some interesting trends you have observed?
So, in Udaipur, we (Sundar and his wife Swati Kittur, a co-author on the study) bumped into a wonderful guy named Vijay Kohli, an assistant professor at Mohanlal Sukhadia University. He said he would like our help starting student work.
Along with a student, Kanishka, who was very interested in all manner of things, we thought of studying the birds of Udaipur because they’re so little known. We thought it would also be of great interest to the ornithological community worldwide to know how an urban area like Udaipur, which is focusing a lot of attention towards tourism, is doing.
As we found out, Udaipur is just an unbelievable city for birds. It has a centralised area where the lakes are there — the birds cannot use anything more than the lakes because there is construction to the edges — but as you start stepping out, there’s a beautiful, myriad, massive diversity. There is agriculture, grassland, tribal lands, and the Aravalli Range right in the city.
We measured variables in three broad aspects to understand how urbanisation affects birds. One is human-related: people walking, cars, cattle. We also recorded some stuff related to traditional nature: scrubland, trees, tree diversity, etc. And then, because Kanishka also quickly picked up GIS, we also developed a landscape diversity index, measuring a bunch of stuff at a landscape scale.
Interestingly, human-related variables had the weakest influence on birds in Udaipur. The strongest influence was at the habitat level: tree diversity, number of trees, amount of scrub lands and grassland, and the proximity to the Aravalli Range. This tells us that Udaipur remains a functional habitat.
If you look at studies worldwide, human-related variables have the strongest influence, usually a strongly negative correlation, on birds. Ecological textbooks will tell you that as the people density increases, the bird diversity decreases. Ecological studies will also tell you that the longer people stay in an area, the more this diversity reduces. But here, the data shows that the whole city is a thriving bird habitat. So, our studies have to be far more nuanced, and — even though I don’t like to say it this way — they have to be more Indianised.
A lot of your work focuses on the ability of species to persist in human-modified areas. Can you further expand on this?
Most of my work is outside protected areas in India, Nepal and Australia. The notion is that there is no wildlife outside of protected areas. There is still, often, a very Western, colonial attitude to conservation. When you see a paper today that comes out saying that it is a global review of urban studies, essentially, 90-95% of the data is from North America and Europe. For sure, they’ll show you a map with a few dots in Africa or India, but there is that bias in the data.
We need to be a little bit more careful in generalising such “global” information because it is heavily biased towards cities that are not like ours. It is very likely those trends will not hold true for our cities unless our cities become truly concretised, like what’s happening in Hyderabad, the outskirts of Bengaluru, or what is beginning to happen in Mysuru. In general, however, development here is a huge, nuanced story, by no means as formulaic as it is in “developed” countries, where they clear the land completely and start afresh. Ironically, the high population density prevents us from doing this here.
Our cities are what is called a conurbation, a coming together of various villages and towns. There are still farmlands inside Bengaluru city. There are temples with huge tanks, massive trees and grasslands in our cities that continue to exist.
We’ve done several studies in Delhi, including one on the city’s ponds, and counted 173 species of birds there. As of now, Delhi has a global record of having the largest number of birds in urban wetlands anywhere in the world. It’s incredible. So, don’t listen to anybody who says you won’t find birds in cities with lots of people.
How does Bengaluru fare regarding urban biodiversity, specifically of bird populations?
Bengaluru used to be a magical city for urban ecology, too. But it is not so anymore. I suspect we are now at a tipping point as far as Bengaluru is concerned.
The traffic doesn’t stop at all; there are too many big buildings and IT parks, and the city is too concretised. Many of the birds we have in India, such as the fantail flycatcher, are territorial. So if an IT park or new airport comes up, you’ve eliminated the population there since they can’t move anywhere, and the rest of the area has already been taken over.
Real estate is a serious business for birds, too. Migratory birds may no longer choose to come here because there is so much disturbance and pollution in most lakes.
You have closely studied the sarus crane and shown how the bird thrives in places outside of protected areas, especially in farmlands. Can you discuss the agricultural practices that support its success as a species in India?
The longitudinal study I did for my PhD in 24 districts showed that Uttar Pradesh has the highest bird diversity of any non-treed agricultural area anywhere in the world. It has 400 plus species [of birds] in just these 24 districts; so, you can imagine how many there are in the other districts there.
What has happened has been a series of happy accidents. One is that it’s intensely monsoon-fed, and few crops can be grown during the monsoon season. Because it gets so flooded, you have to grow a crop amenable to a wetland flooding situation, which happens to be rice. Studies have shown that the Gangetic flood plain is one of the most fertile areas in the world, with the highest diversity and density of soil life anywhere in the world. This has made it possible for species like the sarus and many other species, both migratory and resident, to thrive there.
Interestingly, the Green Revolution made a positive difference for cranes; we have seen from the British historical records that there were not so many cranes before. It has increased the density of irrigation canals, which, in turn, have stabilised rice cultivation. The sarus crane, which is able to adapt and change even strong behaviours, is doing really well in these landscapes. The crane starts breeding when the first flooding is done by the farmer when they anticipate rains. That’s how close they’ve been with the farmer and how long they’ve been with the farmer.
Birds have had incredible cultural significance and symbolism for ages worldwide, including in India. Many are even considered sacred. Does that play any role in helping them survive, even thrive, in a country like India?
India is a very curious country. Without that element, which some people call religious, some people call cultural, I don’t know how to define it, we wouldn’t have had all these birds. In Uttar Pradesh, for instance, there are so many sarus cranes in large part because of the farmers’ indulgence. The first time I went in to measure sarus eggs, I came up back on the road. My bike was surrounded by six people holding sticks because they thought I was stealing eggs. Their first reaction to strangers approaching the sarus is protection.
Of course, there is illegal wildlife trade, which is very, very bad at a scale that you can’t imagine, and hunting in places like Tamil Nadu, Bihar and Punjab. But I have seen many farmers, often the poorest among the poor, protecting the birds who’ve chosen to nest in their fields. Or the fisherfolks in Tamil Nadu and Kerala who revere the white-bellied sea eagle. They won’t touch it. There are also temple groves in which birds have been breeding for decades. It’s a crazy country where you can’t predict anything… makes life difficult for an ecologist (laughs).
