As a young boy growing up in the small town of Chitradurga in central Karnataka, Apoorva BV often spent time observing the natural world. “Animals, birds and insects have always been my favourite topics since childhood,” says the Bengaluru-based beekeeper and beekeeping educator, who has recently set up a one-of-its-kind Bee Museum at the Keladi Shivappa Nayaka Agricultural and Horticultural Sciences in Iruvakki, Shivamogga.

Like most of his peers, he went on to join an engineering college, but by his third year, he found himself drawn into the world of bees after attending a beekeeping session organised by senior beekeeper, S M Shanthaveeraiah of Chandana Madhuvana Gramina Abhivruddhi Sangha, a non-government organisation (NGO) focused on rural development.

It first started as a hobby, explains Apoorva, who began by keeping these insects in his bedroom, close to the windows, where he could observe them, “especially the first flight of the day, which happened at a particular time every day.”

He also began offering help to farmers who attended the beekeeping programmes run by Shanthaveeraiah’s NGO, even volunteering as an assistant trainer. “I then started to explore how I can make this a profession. After graduation, I started to travel across the country to meet beekeepers, staying with apiary workers to learn apiary management,” recalls the founder of The Hive trust, a Bengaluru-headquartered non-profit organisation focused on bee-education and conservation.

It is all this knowledge, painstakingly gathered through the years, that has been funnelled into the new bee museum, which Apoorva hopes will help, “even a person who knows nothing about bees, find them interesting.”

Listing some aspects of bees that are detailed in the museum, Apoorva says, “If you walk around, you will see what honey bees are, the hierarchy in the colony, the equipment used in beekeeping, the difference between solitary and social bees and bee habitats.”

The museum also offers insights into the indispensable role that small pollinators, including bees, wasps, rodents, and birds, play in ecosystem-functioning, as well as some of the challenges they face. “Pesticides, loss of habitat and change in agricultural practices affect all these pollinators, not just bees.”

This is the first time he has worked on a project like this, says this impassioned educator, who has been regularly conducting beekeeping workshops across the State and participating in events such as Krishi Mela, Lalbagh Flower Show, farmers’ markets, and agricultural expositions.

The university, he says, approached him to create this museum, which is not just for university students but also for farmers who visit the university regularly. “Generally, these kinds of things go to professional designers, but, as a beekeeper who always enjoyed educating others on beekeeping, this was a good opportunity for me,” says Apoorva.

According to him, Shivamogga and its surroundings have significant potential to increase their beekeeping capacity. “There are so many beekeepers in Sagar, Thirthahalli, Agumbe and Mandagadde,” he says, adding that he is collaborating with a professor at the university, Jayalaxmi Hegde, on the project.

“She had taken the responsibility of implementing the Tribal Sub-Plan (TSP) scheme and had already conducted beekeeping training programmes for farmers, as well as distributed beekeeping equipment and accessories, along with bees,” says Apoorva. After she had done this, some funds remained, so they decided to channel them into a museum on campus. “And I started working on it.”

The actual process of creating the museum had more than its fair share of challenges, recounts Apoorva. “It took a long time because of the distance: I am in Bengaluru, and Shivamogga is pretty far (around 300 kilometres from Bengaluru); from Shivamogga, we have to go another 50 kilometres to reach this place,” he says.

He also had to deal with seepage, crumbling walls and workers quitting abruptly, unpleasant surprises that had not been budgeted for. “There were nights when I wondered if I should just pack up. But something kept me going. Maybe it was the museum’s purpose. Maybe it was my own,” reminiscences Apoorva, who got the contract last June and took a little under a year to create the museum, which opened to the public in March this year.

While educating people about beekeeping is an important mandate of the museum, the goals go beyond this. “It is not just about making honey, but also about appreciating and treating bees better,” he says. Bees, after all, are not machines or robots but sentient beings well connected to nature, says Apoorva, who believes that treating domesticated bees well is important. “They are highly evolved, probably more evolved than us, so we really need to appreciate them.”

Although India is still at a nascent stage, as far as commercial beekeeping is concerned, since “it was only after independence that the Khadi and Village Industries Commission (KVIC) started to promote it for rural employment”, he feels that beekeeping is an ideal livelihood for farmers and tribals of the Western Ghats. Moreover, “honey from the Western Ghats is rich in aroma and flavour. It also has undiscovered medicinal values,” he says, pointing out that, with the increase of tourism in this area, the market value of honey will only go up. “A family in the Western Ghats can earn a minimum of ₹2 lakhs per year if they keep 50 bee colonies.”

The connection between bats and evil spirits is, unfortunately, a deep, cross-cultural myth that refuses to die, but did you know there is another, more fun spirit they are intricately associated with? Agave plants, the source of tequila and mezcal, depend on bats, especially the Mexican long-nosed bat, for pollination and seed dispersal, says bat researcher Aditya Srinivasulu.

“I work on bats because I grew up surrounded by all things bat (his parents are bat researchers too), and I love them. But they also offer important ecosystem services,” he says, over a Zoom call from Hyderabad, where he is based. The biggest services bats provide to the ecosystem are through their diet, Aditya explains. “Fruit-eaters disperse seeds by excreting them in various places, nectar-eaters pollinate flowers, insect-eaters suppress insect populations, and carnivorous bats help keep rodent populations in check.

Equally importantly, bats serve as ecological indicators. “A good diversity of bats means that you have a healthy ecosystem,” he says, pointing out that they are also just very unique and cool. “They’re the only mammals that can truly fly, they’re super diverse (nearly one-fifth of all mammal species), and have nearly 60 million years of evolution behind incredible adaptations ranging from long tongues for nectar-feeding to complicated echolocation to highly efficient flight.”

However, despite their importance, knowledge about bats remains sparse and fragmented, “across individual papers, unpublished archives, and unevenly sampled regions,” he says. One aspect of these animals that we know especially little about is echolocation, a biological sonar system in which animals, such as bats, dolphins, and some birds, interpret the returning echoes of their emitted sounds to navigate their environment.

“Bats aren’t actually blind. Fruit-eaters can see extremely well, and even insect-eaters have better eyesight than us – they’re just so much better at echolocation,” says the Aditya, who recently led a study cataloguing echolocation data for 86 species of bats, approximately 60% of all South Asian bats known to use echolocation, the results of which were recently published in the Journal of Threatened Taxa.

In the study, Aditya and his co-authors, Chelmala Srinivasulu, Bhargavi Srinivasulu, Deepa Senapathi, and Manuela González-Suárez, performed a meta-analysis of echolocation calls described in 35 research papers and, based on around 6,000 archival recordings, created the first regional database of calls of South Asian bat species.

“Then we mapped this knowledge and found that there are many places where lots of species are known to exist, but we know nothing about their calls, including in ‘biodiversity hotspots’ like the Western Ghats and highland Sri Lanka, Northeast India, and in the Eastern Ghats,” Aditya says.

Genesis

Bats have been studied in the South Asian region for a long time, “effectively since the time of (Carl) Linnaeus described bats…some of the specimens he was seeing were from here,” says Aditya. Conservation, however, is a different story. “There is a lot of work to be done in bat conservation, because until very recently, a lot of bat species were classified as vermin (Under India’s Wildlife (Protection) Act of 1972, animals classified as vermin can be legally hunted).”

Then, in the ‘90s, two bat species, Salim Ali’s fruit bat and Wroughton’s free-tailed bat, were classified as Schedule 1 species, meaning they are given the highest level of protection under wildlife laws. “Now, I think we have a total of six species in Schedule 1 and the rest of the bat species aren’t classified as vermin anymore. In that sense, there is progress, but it is recent,” he says, which, in turn, means there is still a lot of work to be done in bat conservation.

Aditya, who recently received his PhD from the University of Reading (UK), was trying to better understand bats in South Asia as part of his doctoral research, which led to this paper. “The main theme of my PhD was to explore how much (and how little) we know about bats in South Asia,” says Aditya. His study focused on their geographic distribution and how ecological disturbances caused by human activities, including climate change and habitat destruction, are affecting them.

Yet another crucial aspect of his study was to better understand what Aditya refers to as the functional traits of bats. These are traits, he says, that do not just describe how a species looks and behaves, but more crucially, how it actually interfaces with its habitat.

Echolocation, for example, is an important functional trait. “For instance, a bat calling using high-pitched and short calls (which dissipate very quickly in the air) will have to fly fast and low near foliage to make sure it doesn’t lose ‘sight’ of where it’s going. “Just from two call traits (how high and how short the call is), we’ve now inferred how high and fast the bat can fly, where it might prefer to fly, and also what it might eat,” he says.

Conservation and knowledge

Not only do studies on functional traits, like Aditya’s, reveal more about the biology of bats, but they could also be critical tools in our conservation efforts. “From the lens of conservation, this allows scientists to observe nature without disturbing it and, importantly, opens up the possibility of monitoring bat species across various locations without the need for collecting, handling, and stressing the animals out,” he says.

Given that over a third of bats worldwide are threatened, “I think building our knowledge while also minimising our impact on nature is the way forward to effectively conserving them.“

In Aditya’s opinion, the more we learn about bats, the less we fear them, especially considering we already have a rather chequered relationship with these animals. “South Asia’s culture is incredibly complex and historic, and this relates to our relationship with bats too. Ranging from fear and superstition to worship in some places, to subsistence on bats as the only source of food, there’s a complicated and diverse relationship between people and bats in this region.”

Throw in the fact that bats are also associated with zoonotic diseases like rabies, COVID-19, and Nipah, and we see bats almost exclusively through a prism of fear.

Aditya understands why we fear them, but believes it is important we remember that they are just wild animals like any other: the less we fear them, the better we will get at protecting them. “We are sharing the same space and the same planet – it’s never us vs them. Our job is to make sure we don’t hurt them and to learn as much about them as we can, because I believe our relationship with nature is extremely integral to cultural heritage.”

British colonialism turned India’s tigers into trophies. Between 1860 and 1950, more than 65,000 were shot for their skins. The fortunes of the Bengal tiger, one of Earth’s biggest species of big cat, did not markedly improve post-independence. The hunting of tigers – and the animals they eat, like deer and wild pigs – continued, while large tracts of their forest habitat became farmland.

India established Project Tiger in 1972 when there were fewer than 2,000 tigers remaining; it is now one of the world’s longest-running conservation programmes. The project aimed to protect and increase tiger numbers by creating reserves from existing protected areas like national parks and wildlife sanctuaries. Part of that process has involved forcing people to relocate.

In protected areas globally, nature conservationists can find themselves at odds with the needs of local communities. Some scientists have argued that, in order for them to thrive, tigers need forests that are completely free of people who might otherwise graze livestock or collect firewood. In a few documented cases, the tiger population has indeed recovered once people were removed from tiger reserves.

But in pitting people against wildlife, relocations foster bigger problems that do not serve the long-term interests of conservation.

India’s Relocation Policy

Under Project Tiger, 27 tiger reserves were established by 2005, each spanning somewhere between 500 and 2,500 square kilometres. Tiger reserves have a core in which people are prevented from grazing livestock, hunting wildlife and collecting wood, leaves and flowers. A buffer zone encircles this. Here, such activities are allowed, but regulated.

About 3,000 families were relocated from these core zones in the first three decades of the project, and from 2005 until 2023, about 22,000 families were moved. Most relocations were involuntary and some plunged those ousted into deeper poverty.

In Sariska tiger reserve in Rajasthan, northwestern India, the first relocation was made during 1976-77. Some of the families returned to the reserve after being given land unsuitable for farming as compensation. This was a poor advertisement for relocation which few other communities opted for voluntarily.

After they were moved from Rajaji tiger reserve in 2012, Gujjar pastoralists who make their living grazing buffalo were prompted to take up farming on new land. With little experience in agriculture, and having been denied their traditional source of income, many struggled to adjust.

The Gujjar did at least gain access to water pumps and electricity. In one case, in the Bhadra tiger reserve in Karnataka, southwestern India, relocation was less painful as people were offered quality agricultural land who already had prior farming experience.

Most people who lost their right to graze livestock or collect forest produce in newly established tiger reserves went on to labour in tea and coffee plantations or factories.

Despite widespread relocations, the tiger population in India continued to plummet, reaching an all-time low of fewer than 1,500 in 2006. Tigers became extinct in Sariska and Panna tiger reserves in 2004 and 2007 respectively.

Local extinction in Sariska prompted the government to enlist the help of tiger biologists and social scientists in 2005. This task force found that illegal hunting of tigers was still happening, their claws, teeth, bones and skin harvested for use in Chinese medicine. Mining and grazing had also continued within many reserves.

Corridors Of Power

The tiger task force acknowledged that having the local community onside helped prevent illegal hunting and forest fires. The Soliga tribes of Biligiri Rangananthaswamy temple tiger reserve in Karnataka decided not to relocate when offered compensation, but instead took up work rooting out invasive plants like lantana and curbing illegal hunting and timber felling. The Soliga are among the very few communities who have been rewarded with rights in tiger reserves.

Similarly, in Parambikulam tiger reserve in Kerala, a state on India’s tropical Malabar coast, communities that were not relocated found work as tour guides and forest guards. People here have supplemented their income by collecting and selling honey, wild gooseberry and medicinal spices, under the joint supervision of the community and forest department officials. Many families have been able to give up cattle rearing as a result, reducing grazing pressure on the forest.

Despite these successes, the government’s policy of relocation remains.

Tiger numbers have recovered to more than 3,000 as of 2022, but Project Tiger shows that relocation alone cannot conserve tigers indefinitely.

A great opportunity awaits. Over 38 million hectares of forest, suitable tiger habitat, lies outside tiger reserves. Declaring these forests “corridors” that allow tigers to move between reserves could reduce the risk of inbreeding and local extinction and reinforce the recovery of India’s tigers.

Studies in certain tiger reserves show that large numbers of villagers would support further relocations if it meant gaining access to drinking water, schools, healthcare and jobs in resettlement sites. A portion of the US$30 million (£22.7 million) spent annually by Project Tiger should be used to make relocations fair. Or better yet, promote the kind of community-based conservation nurtured in the Biligiri Ranganathaswamy temple and Parambikulam tiger reserves.

(Authors: Dhanapal Govindarajulu, Postgraduate Researcher, Global Development Institute, University of Manchester; Divya Gupta, Assistant Professor, Binghamton University, State University of New York, and Ghazala Shahabuddin, Visiting Professor of Environmental Studies, Ashoka University)

(Disclosure Statement: The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment)

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

A rainy September morning, an eclectic group of nature experts and amateurs is gathered about a bush in Sipna jungle near Panshet, around 25 kilometres away from the city of Pune.

”This is a great find!” Rajat Joshi, the Pune district coordinator for Big Butterfly Month announces. We all peer obligingly. It is a pupa of a butterfly belonging to the Pansy family; perhaps the Lemon Pansy we saw fluttering around a while ago.

For this group, that is indeed a good find. In September, butterfly and moth (together the order Lepidoptera) enthusiasts have an even more crystalised reason to pursue their passion for their pet creatures— it is Big Butterfly Month across India. It’s a citizen science, conservation and outreach effort centred on butterflies and to some extent their less popular cousins, the moths.

What is Big Butterfly Month about?

Shantanu Dey, founder-convenor of Big Butterfly Month and avid butterfly expert based in Mumbai, says the main purpose of this month is to bring awareness to the broader challenges in conservation.

”There are two parts to it,” he says. The first part is the science— the attempt to increase citizen counts of butterflies— lots of data handling, data collecting, and recording of species.

Citizens are encouraged to maintain regular timed counts in a set area, making detailed notes and repeating the exercise on a fortnightly basis. Some of this data will find its way online through citizen observation portals like iNaturalist, Indian Biodiversity Portal and Butterflies of India. During Big Butterfly Month, there is an observable uptick in such logs.

The second aspect of Big Butterfly Month is outreach activities, aimed at increasing general awareness of the winged critters— perhaps being able to identify a few species and how not to harm them. The idea, according to Mr. Dey, is that people “get interested in butterflies in general and in the ecosystem in its totality.”

This year, 22 States are involved in Big Butterfly Month; an attempt has been made to cover all districts in the nation, including far-flung areas like Ladakh and the Andamans. The event has also crept over the border into Pakistan— Pakistan Butterfly Society held an inaugural Butterfly Walk of Pakistan at Maple School and College in Saidu Shareef, Swat, as part of a regional initiative titled the Big Butterfly Month- Indian Subcontinent 2023.

As Mr. Dey says, “for experts there are other avenues; for everyone else, there is Big Butterfly Month.”

Also read: First-ever butterfly survey in Mudumalai Tiger Reserve records 175 species

A Pune outing

During the Sipna walk, there is already deep enthusiasm to locate species, extending from creatures that look like bright splotches of colour to those that seek to escape attention by mimicking dead leaves. At one point, the group is divided between seeing a hyperactive Skipper fluttering through snakeweed plants or a Common Evening Brown, a crumpled leaf lookalike that likes the ground beneath the shade. Both are brown, and both are beautiful to this group.

The group is also enthused alike by caterpillars munching away at leaves- a Plain Tiger caterpillar on a garden lantana plant, a Red Pierrot caterpillar inside a Rui (Calotropis gigantea) leaf, and a Tailed Jay caterpillar barely distinguishable from his green leafy background.

Moth caterpillars too are spotted, and noted; a particularly intense level of enthusiasm is bestowed to female butterflies hovering around plants searching for a place to lay eggs— some of them tiny white dots that would otherwise escape scrutiny.

The Sipna jungle is a unique place, a manmade forest with a mix of exotic and native plants. Started by Pramod Nargolkar in 1989, it is now run by his wife Nayana Nargolkar. The forest was soon a large 22-acre venture, named Sipna for a river in Melghat Tiger Reserve— a favorite of its founder. In 2004, following the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami, Mr. Nargholkar, then visiting the Andamans, was reported missing, along with several others from Pune. But from 2005, the project soldiered on, under the careful tending of Mrs. Nargolkar, and 10 to 12 acres now remain.

A butterfly garden is a recent addition to the mix, created last year to provide a different attraction for students and children. Mrs. Nargolkar and Mr. Joshi came in contact a few months ago, and around 30 to 40 plants were added to the garden. These include butterfly host plants like milkweed, snakeweed, periwinkle, garden lantana and Bryophyllum plants.

This marks the first time a Big Butterfly Month event is taking place here.

Chasing butterflies in Mumbai

If Sipna marks a private endeavour to conserve plants and encourage biodiversity, the Maharashtra Nature Park (MNP) represents a government initiative in the same vein— in a different city. A park created by plantation on what was originally a dumping ground/landfill, MNP borders the Dharavi area in Mumbai— known more in popular culture for less-than-genteel dwellings than for natural beauty.

It was here that, on September 10, another BBM event was held by a local NGO called Naturalist— albeit of a slightly different shade. This one was about creating butterfly gardens, with details about host plants for larvae and nectaring plants for adult butterflies —and how to potentially build one in your own home. The NGO, in collaboration with the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA), held a lecture followed by a trail to identify both butterflies and the plants that beguile them.

Sachin Rane, Naturalist co-founder and leader of the day’s event, says the park is Asia’s first project of this nature—37 acres of manmade forest on an erstwhile dumping ground.

The future sustainability of landfill -turned- ecozone MNP is something experts will perhaps deliberate over with mixed opinions. But the place sees a score of butterflies — ranging from ubiquitous grass yellows to common leopards, Danaid eggflys, white orange tips, and red Pierrots. More than 85 butterfly species can be found in this park, according to Mr. Rane. The greater Mumbai region, he says, hosts 165 species, if you include Panvel and Navi Mumbai.

During the event, Mr. Rane notes the most important requirements for a butterfly garden— sunlight for several hours a day, plants which are hosts for specific butterfly species (for example, the tamarind is a host plant for the Black Rajah and Bryophyllum plants is a host for red Pierrot caterpillars). These host plants should also be within a 50 metre-radius from a flowering plant.

There is a hands-on activity as well— everyone gets to plant a tree in MNP; each tree is the host plant for a particular butterfly species. And at the end of the event, each participant receives Jamaican Blue Spike plants (also called blue snakeweed or vervain) — a species mentioned by Indian Biodiversity Portal as attracting butterflies to its flowers and being a host plant for Death’s Head Hawkmoth caterpillars.

The NGO has more events in the works— it plans to host a butterfly trail at the Conservation Education Center on September 23, while a Butterfly Race is being planned for September 24, where participants will be tasked with photographing as many species as possible from the morning till sunset, in locations across Mumbai and its suburbs, including Navi Mumbai and Panvel.

Documenting the known and finding the unknown

This month has seen variety in programming— if there are introductory sessions for amateurs and data collection walks for the slightly more knowledgeable, there are fun activities for students and children—like a butterfly painting competition on the K.J Somaiya campus in Mumbai’s Vidyavihar area.

On September 9, under the aegis of Big Butterfly month, Club Zoology of the Zoology department of K.J. Somaiya College of Science and Commerce also organised a macro photography workshop, in collaboration with Photowalks Mumbai and photo equipment company Godox. Even at 8 in the morning, the hall is filled with bright faces. The subject— macro photography — is of keen interest to anyone trying to document creatures that range from the length of a fingernail to as big as a man’s face.

The speaker is noted wildlife photographer Yuvraj Gurjar, who has held exhibitions and won international awards for his work centred around many species— spiders, orchids, mushrooms, beetles, and of course, butterflies. Back in their day, when they were “wandering in forests in the 80s, a camera was like a Cinderella,” Mr Gurjar said, highlighting further that even regular cameras may not suffice for the purpose. As he says, a birding lens cannot shoot butterflies, which can range from the large Atlas moth, measuring 10-12 inches, to the tiny Grass Jewel, a mere 14 millimetres.

Also read:Spot a Blue Pansy butterfly on a periwinkle flower

As he talks the crowd through how to select a background to make the subject pop, and how to light up a subject, Mr. Gurjar scrolls through his own work, not just of butterflies — of a scorpion with its babies on its back, snake cannibalism and a mosquito oozing a drop of extra blood, which won a national award.

One thing he makes clear— as nature lovers, wildlife photographers are not to cause harm to the subject. “Leave it as it is,” he says. When asked about whether flashes may harm butterflies, Mr. Gurjar is less severe. Insects have compound eyes, he points out; they are startled but not harmed by photography.

The crowd tests its newly acquired knowledge in the field. The college has a biodiversity garden, created in 2019 under the guidance of the iNaturewatch founder Dr V. Shubhalaxmi, funded by the US Consulate under a mentorship programme for youth leaders in environment conservation. Now, the little patch hosts many butterfly species— tailed jays, blue tigers, glassy blues, common Mormons, and crimson roses.

At every event, participants milled around capturing shots of little creatures. If generating interest was the aim of Big Butterfly Month, it was clear that it had been piqued, in three groups of around 20 people, at various locations across Maharashtra.

Sparking a citizen science movement

But I wondered about the other aspect— conservation. Were we, as amateur enthusiasts, adding to our environment or taking away, I wondered morosely, as I saw the leaves flattened by our footsteps in Sipna.
“There is a lot of regrowth here,” Mr. Joshi reassures me — if I come back a month later, all of this will be renewed.

And citizen scientists are hard at work, holding timed counts on butterfly walks— in Bangalore, Mysore, Dehradun, Pune, Jammu & Kashmir. The Indian Butterfly Monitoring Scheme (IBMS) was launched in 2021, after a few local monitoring efforts proved fruitful, chiefly in Bengaluru. Earlier this month, IBMS was also launched in Mysore, by Dr. Krushnamegh Kunte, Associate Professor at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bengaluru.

Citizen counts online rise during this September. Mr. Joshi told local media that last year, nearly 1,336 observations were registered by 55 enthusiasts in Pune during the month of September— with around 130 butterfly species documented. This is an uptick from 2019— when Big Butterfly Month was first launched at a national scale— with around 200 observations.

According to data from the Big Butterfly Month website, this year’s tally stands at 10,894 observations from 608 users, from 205 districts. Last year saw 14, 497 from 867 users. Maharashtra leads the table in number of observations and users— like last year.

That there is enthusiastic participation from this region is no surprise. After all, a local Big Butterfly Month was launched in Mumbai 7 years ago— by Sohail Madan and Shantanu Dey with the aid of the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS). It then went national in 2019. Pune Butterfly Club was in fact launched due to Big Butterfly Month, says Mr. Dey. Further, the Western Ghats, a biodiversity hotspot, have a sizeable number of species— a report cites 337 species sighted in the area.

They are of course no match for the Northeastern region, which hosts an astounding number of lepidopteran species— one paper places it at a mind-boggling 3600. But the prevalent ethnic strife in Manipur and its fallout across the region have tamped down outreach efforts in the region— although Mr. Dey informs me that counts are still going on.

The eventual aim is to harness civilian interest to track populations of butterflies nationwide, a data-gathering exercise that will bear fruit not in days and months, but years. Keeping track of butterfly populations in various parts of the country is expected to shed light on the health of local ecosystems; butterflies are regarded as a keystone species and are crucial pollinators for several flowering plants. 

After a morning of rain, a consistent sun only emerges as our walk through Sipna winds down. We have spotted 27 species— a good find for a rainy day.

As we all leave the forest, the little path is filled with light, and more butterflies, now undisturbed by human presence, slowly emerge. As the grass yellows flutter around calmly, in leisurely fashion, I find myself hoping that Big Butterfly Month succeeds in its mission.

On September 23 and 24, Naturalist Foundation will hold a trail and a Butterfly Race in Mumbai. Learn more here.Find other Big Butterfly Month events near you here and here.

See data from Big Butterfly Month here.

A rainy September morning, an eclectic group of nature experts and amateurs is gathered about a bush in Sipna jungle near Panshet, around 25 kilometres away from the city of Pune.

”This is a great find!” Rajat Joshi, the Pune district coordinator for Big Butterfly Month announces. We all peer obligingly. It is a pupa of a butterfly belonging to the Pansy family; perhaps the Lemon Pansy we saw fluttering around a while ago.

For this group, that is indeed a good find. In September, butterfly and moth (together the order Lepidoptera) enthusiasts have an even more crystalised reason to pursue their passion for their pet creatures— it is Big Butterfly Month across India. It’s a citizen science, conservation and outreach effort centred on butterflies and to some extent their less popular cousins, the moths.

What is Big Butterfly Month about?

Shantanu Dey, founder-convenor of Big Butterfly Month and avid butterfly expert based in Mumbai, says the main purpose of this month is to bring awareness to the broader challenges in conservation.

”There are two parts to it,” he says. The first part is the science— the attempt to increase citizen counts of butterflies— lots of data handling, data collecting, and recording of species.

Citizens are encouraged to maintain regular timed counts in a set area, making detailed notes and repeating the exercise on a fortnightly basis. Some of this data will find its way online through citizen observation portals like iNaturalist, Indian Biodiversity Portal and Butterflies of India. During Big Butterfly Month, there is an observable uptick in such logs.

The second aspect of Big Butterfly Month is outreach activities, aimed at increasing general awareness of the winged critters— perhaps being able to identify a few species and how not to harm them. The idea, according to Mr. Dey, is that people “get interested in butterflies in general and in the ecosystem in its totality.”

This year, 22 States are involved in Big Butterfly Month; an attempt has been made to cover all districts in the nation, including far-flung areas like Ladakh and the Andamans. The event has also crept over the border into Pakistan— Pakistan Butterfly Society held an inaugural Butterfly Walk of Pakistan at Maple School and College in Saidu Shareef, Swat, as part of a regional initiative titled the Big Butterfly Month- Indian Subcontinent 2023.

As Mr. Dey says, “for experts there are other avenues; for everyone else, there is Big Butterfly Month.”

Also read: First-ever butterfly survey in Mudumalai Tiger Reserve records 175 species

A Pune outing

During the Sipna walk, there is already deep enthusiasm to locate species, extending from creatures that look like bright splotches of colour to those that seek to escape attention by mimicking dead leaves. At one point, the group is divided between seeing a hyperactive Skipper fluttering through snakeweed plants or a Common Evening Brown, a crumpled leaf lookalike that likes the ground beneath the shade. Both are brown, and both are beautiful to this group.

The group is also enthused alike by caterpillars munching away at leaves- a Plain Tiger caterpillar on a garden lantana plant, a Red Pierrot caterpillar inside a Rui (Calotropis gigantea) leaf, and a Tailed Jay caterpillar barely distinguishable from his green leafy background.

Moth caterpillars too are spotted, and noted; a particularly intense level of enthusiasm is bestowed to female butterflies hovering around plants searching for a place to lay eggs— some of them tiny white dots that would otherwise escape scrutiny.

The Sipna jungle is a unique place, a manmade forest with a mix of exotic and native plants. Started by Pramod Nargolkar in 1989, it is now run by his wife Nayana Nargolkar. The forest was soon a large 22-acre venture, named Sipna for a river in Melghat Tiger Reserve— a favorite of its founder. In 2004, following the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami, Mr. Nargholkar, then visiting the Andamans, was reported missing, along with several others from Pune. But from 2005, the project soldiered on, under the careful tending of Mrs. Nargolkar, and 10 to 12 acres now remain.

A butterfly garden is a recent addition to the mix, created last year to provide a different attraction for students and children. Mrs. Nargolkar and Mr. Joshi came in contact a few months ago, and around 30 to 40 plants were added to the garden. These include butterfly host plants like milkweed, snakeweed, periwinkle, garden lantana and Bryophyllum plants.

This marks the first time a Big Butterfly Month event is taking place here.

Chasing butterflies in Mumbai

If Sipna marks a private endeavour to conserve plants and encourage biodiversity, the Maharashtra Nature Park (MNP) represents a government initiative in the same vein— in a different city. A park created by plantation on what was originally a dumping ground/landfill, MNP borders the Dharavi area in Mumbai— known more in popular culture for less-than-genteel dwellings than for natural beauty.

It was here that, on September 10, another BBM event was held by a local NGO called Naturalist— albeit of a slightly different shade. This one was about creating butterfly gardens, with details about host plants for larvae and nectaring plants for adult butterflies —and how to potentially build one in your own home. The NGO, in collaboration with the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA), held a lecture followed by a trail to identify both butterflies and the plants that beguile them.

Sachin Rane, Naturalist co-founder and leader of the day’s event, says the park is Asia’s first project of this nature—37 acres of manmade forest on an erstwhile dumping ground.

The future sustainability of landfill -turned- ecozone MNP is something experts will perhaps deliberate over with mixed opinions. But the place sees a score of butterflies — ranging from ubiquitous grass yellows to common leopards, Danaid eggflys, white orange tips, and red Pierrots. More than 85 butterfly species can be found in this park, according to Mr. Rane. The greater Mumbai region, he says, hosts 165 species, if you include Panvel and Navi Mumbai.

During the event, Mr. Rane notes the most important requirements for a butterfly garden— sunlight for several hours a day, plants which are hosts for specific butterfly species (for example, the tamarind is a host plant for the Black Rajah and Bryophyllum plants is a host for red Pierrot caterpillars). These host plants should also be within a 50 metre-radius from a flowering plant.

There is a hands-on activity as well— everyone gets to plant a tree in MNP; each tree is the host plant for a particular butterfly species. And at the end of the event, each participant receives Jamaican Blue Spike plants (also called blue snakeweed or vervain) — a species mentioned by Indian Biodiversity Portal as attracting butterflies to its flowers and being a host plant for Death’s Head Hawkmoth caterpillars.

The NGO has more events in the works— it plans to host a butterfly trail at the Conservation Education Center on September 23, while a Butterfly Race is being planned for September 24, where participants will be tasked with photographing as many species as possible from the morning till sunset, in locations across Mumbai and its suburbs, including Navi Mumbai and Panvel.

Documenting the known and finding the unknown

This month has seen variety in programming— if there are introductory sessions for amateurs and data collection walks for the slightly more knowledgeable, there are fun activities for students and children—like a butterfly painting competition on the K.J Somaiya campus in Mumbai’s Vidyavihar area.

On September 9, under the aegis of Big Butterfly month, Club Zoology of the Zoology department of K.J. Somaiya College of Science and Commerce also organised a macro photography workshop, in collaboration with Photowalks Mumbai and photo equipment company Godox. Even at 8 in the morning, the hall is filled with bright faces. The subject— macro photography — is of keen interest to anyone trying to document creatures that range from the length of a fingernail to as big as a man’s face.

The speaker is noted wildlife photographer Yuvraj Gurjar, who has held exhibitions and won international awards for his work centred around many species— spiders, orchids, mushrooms, beetles, and of course, butterflies. Back in their day, when they were “wandering in forests in the 80s, a camera was like a Cinderella,” Mr Gurjar said, highlighting further that even regular cameras may not suffice for the purpose. As he says, a birding lens cannot shoot butterflies, which can range from the large Atlas moth, measuring 10-12 inches, to the tiny Grass Jewel, a mere 14 millimetres.

Also read:Spot a Blue Pansy butterfly on a periwinkle flower

As he talks the crowd through how to select a background to make the subject pop, and how to light up a subject, Mr. Gurjar scrolls through his own work, not just of butterflies — of a scorpion with its babies on its back, snake cannibalism and a mosquito oozing a drop of extra blood, which won a national award.

One thing he makes clear— as nature lovers, wildlife photographers are not to cause harm to the subject. “Leave it as it is,” he says. When asked about whether flashes may harm butterflies, Mr. Gurjar is less severe. Insects have compound eyes, he points out; they are startled but not harmed by photography.

The crowd tests its newly acquired knowledge in the field. The college has a biodiversity garden, created in 2019 under the guidance of the iNaturewatch founder Dr V. Shubhalaxmi, funded by the US Consulate under a mentorship programme for youth leaders in environment conservation. Now, the little patch hosts many butterfly species— tailed jays, blue tigers, glassy blues, common Mormons, and crimson roses.

At every event, participants milled around capturing shots of little creatures. If generating interest was the aim of Big Butterfly Month, it was clear that it had been piqued, in three groups of around 20 people, at various locations across Maharashtra.

Sparking a citizen science movement

But I wondered about the other aspect— conservation. Were we, as amateur enthusiasts, adding to our environment or taking away, I wondered morosely, as I saw the leaves flattened by our footsteps in Sipna.
“There is a lot of regrowth here,” Mr. Joshi reassures me — if I come back a month later, all of this will be renewed.

And citizen scientists are hard at work, holding timed counts on butterfly walks— in Bangalore, Mysore, Dehradun, Pune, Jammu & Kashmir. The Indian Butterfly Monitoring Scheme (IBMS) was launched in 2021, after a few local monitoring efforts proved fruitful, chiefly in Bengaluru. Earlier this month, IBMS was also launched in Mysore, by Dr. Krushnamegh Kunte, Associate Professor at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bengaluru.

Citizen counts online rise during this September. Mr. Joshi told local media that last year, nearly 1,336 observations were registered by 55 enthusiasts in Pune during the month of September— with around 130 butterfly species documented. This is an uptick from 2019— when Big Butterfly Month was first launched at a national scale— with around 200 observations.

According to data from the Big Butterfly Month website, this year’s tally stands at 10,894 observations from 608 users, from 205 districts. Last year saw 14, 497 from 867 users. Maharashtra leads the table in number of observations and users— like last year.

That there is enthusiastic participation from this region is no surprise. After all, a local Big Butterfly Month was launched in Mumbai 7 years ago— by Sohail Madan and Shantanu Dey with the aid of the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS). It then went national in 2019. Pune Butterfly Club was in fact launched due to Big Butterfly Month, says Mr. Dey. Further, the Western Ghats, a biodiversity hotspot, have a sizeable number of species— a report cites 337 species sighted in the area.

They are of course no match for the Northeastern region, which hosts an astounding number of lepidopteran species— one paper places it at a mind-boggling 3600. But the prevalent ethnic strife in Manipur and its fallout across the region have tamped down outreach efforts in the region— although Mr. Dey informs me that counts are still going on.

The eventual aim is to harness civilian interest to track populations of butterflies nationwide, a data-gathering exercise that will bear fruit not in days and months, but years. Keeping track of butterfly populations in various parts of the country is expected to shed light on the health of local ecosystems; butterflies are regarded as a keystone species and are crucial pollinators for several flowering plants. 

After a morning of rain, a consistent sun only emerges as our walk through Sipna winds down. We have spotted 27 species— a good find for a rainy day.

As we all leave the forest, the little path is filled with light, and more butterflies, now undisturbed by human presence, slowly emerge. As the grass yellows flutter around calmly, in leisurely fashion, I find myself hoping that Big Butterfly Month succeeds in its mission.

On September 23 and 24, Naturalist Foundation will hold a trail and a Butterfly Race in Mumbai. Learn more here.Find other Big Butterfly Month events near you here and here.

See data from Big Butterfly Month here.