Red-letter days make for great Instagram posts. So you’ll see a lot of armchair posts from the illuminati. Hashtagged and amplified, they notch up likes and make an online festival of it. Offline, at the wetlands, it’s another story.
Winter is fading into an uncertain springtime that will, at the shortest notice, morph into a scorching summer. The sun rises and sets, the mist diffuses, the water dries, and the birds fly. The morning walkers shake their heads, click their tongues, and complain about the marshy stench, ignoring the execrable odour of garbage from the dump nearby where sows with striped piglets fend off packs of dogs. A few do-gooders reminisce of a time that was. A time not so long ago.
That’s the way a wetland dies. It desiccates and seeps into memory, and then awaits a rain of retrospective wisdom that may never come.
Today, February 2, is World Wetlands Day. I rose at 5:30 AM and did what I do on most weekends. I made a beeline for the two lakes in my neighbourhood that I have been observing for the last many years. It’s more like a death watch, sitting by Time’s bedside awaiting the Reaper.
The Bellandur Metastasis
The Bellandur growth story can only be described as a rapidly progressing cancer, and with nothing but metastatic adjectives. In the nearly 14 years that I have lived here, this locality — home to glass-and-steel tech parks and high-rise housing — has turned into one of Bengaluru’s most haunting horror stories. And we’re not even talking about the traffic.
Before this ravenous metropolis devoured them, Kaikondrahalli Lake and Kasavanahalli Lake were connected by a marshy channel — known on survey maps as the raja kaluve — that drained into the Bellandur and Varthur catchments. The outflow from Kasavanahalli Lake, which is at a slightly higher elevation, drained into the Kaikondrahalli Lake. A few years ago, some enterprising builders in collusion with pliable officials of the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) and other regulatory bodies, began filling up the channel with debris as the first step of a construction initiative. Damage done, the lakes began to suffer.
Citizens for wetlands
There has been an admirable and concerted drive by several active citizen groups to make residents and stakeholders part of their mission to improve awareness about the consequences of such unsustainable actions. But inch by inch, the powerful political lobby has claimed the battle for its own. Despite the activism, the ‘development’ activity has continued, but for intervals where it has been stayed by injunctions. When money changed hands, these initiatives were surreptitiously restarted.
As it happens with such land-use wars, there are winners only for the short term. The long-term losses are collective.
Winners, losers or victims?
Today, the ill-effects of these encroachments on Kasavanahalli and Kaikondrahalli Lakes are there to see. Garbage dumping and shadowy construction activities, in addition to licensed but exploitative fishing, grass-cutting and pollution through raw sewage and effluents, have tightened the noose around both these lakes. A spate of bird deaths was reported last year from Kasavanahalli Lake. High-rises loom where once there was marshland supporting a rich biodiversity including migratory and resident birds.
Where once the Grey Francolin called proudly to announce its territorial claims, today there is an ominous silence broken only at dawn and dusk by its stubborn cry for survival. Already, the wetland verges where it once grazed unmolested have been usurped.
I have monitored both lakes over the last few years, actively documenting and check-listing since 2014. The birds are not going down tamely. They are putting up a fight. Since the end of December 2018, I have made more than 10 trips to these lakes, and collectively my eBird checklists have yielded over 73 species. Overall, I have documented over a hundred species at these wetlands across seasons.
This winter has seen Kasavanahalli Lake dry up. The edges are shallow, and the lake bed has been receding. The exposed mudflats have attracted a range of different birds not recorded here in the last five years — from waders like Little Stints and Little Ringed Plovers to larger-than-usual flocks of Glossy Ibis and Wood Sandpipers. The Asian Openbill Storks have multiplied while the Eurasian Coots, which rely on deeper waters, have diminished in number. Along with the resident Spot-billed Ducks are seen other species, including winter migrants like Northern Pintails and Garganey. Black-winged Stilts, usually seen in the shallowest waters, throng the lake bed, while the four resident species of herons look on like perplexed assassins, evoking that old Panchatantra tale of the heron and the crab.
An ominous winter
It’s a great winter for birding, no doubt. But it is an ominous one, too. The approaching summer could be here before we know it, and what may become of the rains this year we do not know. Despite the heavy monsoon theatrics of the past year, there’s little water to show for it, and the more disturbing story is that the ongoing construction all around Kasavanahalli Lake, in particular, has obstructed some of the inflow channels.
Earthmovers busy about excavating and piling up mountains of soil into the marshy wetlands where Rosy Starlings and Yellow Wagtails congregate by the hundreds. Housing is a huge scarcity, and not for humans alone.
On World Wetlands Day, I walked my favourite paths again. Inside me, I felt a funeral welling up. A lapwing screamed alarm atop a stack of earth that a growling JCB earthmover had piled up.
“Did you do it? Did you do it?”
In guilty shame, I hung my head and muttered to no one: “I did, I did.”
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