All Posts

City Nature Challenge Delhi 2026 Cities are often imagined as places far removed from nature. Yet Delhi continues to support a remarkable diversity of life—birds in neighbourhood parks, insects in roadside vegetation, fungi after the rains, and plants quietly growing in forgotten corners of the city. The City Nature Challenge invites people across the world to step outside and document the biodiversity of their cities using the iNaturalist platform. Over a few days, citizens

In a fast-growing city like Delhi, surrounded by traffic, concrete, and constant movement, it is easy to assume that nature exists somewhere far away from us. Yet the city continues to pulse with life. Birds move through its skies, insects hum among roadside trees, fungi emerge quietly after rains, and small plants find ways to grow through cracks in pavements. Delhi is not separate from nature—it is part of it. But how often do we stop to notice? City Nature Challenge is an

In older calendars, festivals were marked by the moon, the harvest, the monsoon, or the turning of seasons. They were moments when communities paused ordinary life to pay attention—to abundance, scarcity, gratitude, or renewal. In today’s cities, however, seasons blur under concrete, time is measured by deadlines, and attention is the most endangered resource of all. Yet, quietly, new kinds of festivals are emerging—ones that do not demand ritual fire or grand procession, but

Holi is a festival of color, where people joyfully smear pigments on friends and strangers alike. Yet an equally important ritual follows the celebration is the careful and sometimes desperate attempt to wash those colors away. This is evident by the peculiar sight on the streets of my neighborhood I notice. The small naalis —the narrow drains that run along the edges of roads—begin to flow with faint shades of pink and green. On a closer examination it becomes clear that the

We believe birdwatching is a festival. Not because it is rare for us (we watch birds throughout the year) but because every act of attentive looking feels celebratory. This is the second year, we have tried to approach the Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC) more intentionally, treating it not just as participation in a global citizen-science event, but as a moment of collective reflection on urban nature. GBBC is a four-day global bird monitoring programme where participants re

Living in the city carries an inescapable frustration—polluted air, vanishing waterbodies, shrinking green spaces, and anxieties about extraction and loss. This unrest is lived, bodily, and shared. This workshop treats frustration not as resignation, but as a starting point. Through nature writing and blogging, it invites participants to articulate discomfort, notice urban ecologies, and give form to care, unease, and unfinished thought—so personal anxieties can become collec

Urban Nature Matters invites writers to share stories that explore the delicate intersections of city life and the natural world. From birds singing on balconies to insects that return quietly to familiar corners, from small patches of greenery to waterbodies that persist despite human encroachment, we welcome unfinished, reflective, and personal pieces that notice the life that thrives around us.

How the highly polluted and populous city continues to be the second most bird-rich capital in the world

When I think about my everyday schedule, I seem to be performing like a machine. There are so many tasks that I do every day, exactly in the same way. But what makes me different from an ordinary machine is that while doing these repetitive tasks at the same hours, I am able to observe complexity in triviality. Recently, I had one such experience inside my own house.  For the past seven or eight months, every morning I have been opening an airtight container filled with walnu

Our rooftop is enlivened by a variety of vibrant plants, which my mother carefully tends to and which flourish in various pots In the hot summers of 2012, a bitter gourd sapling sprouted in a plant pot that my mother nurtured amidst the hoarded things on our terrace. Most of these pots included very old gamlas, broken buckets, and vessels. She would usually spend her evening tea time in the garden, turning the soil with water and some kitchen waste. I would join her now and t

This report, generated using the MYNA application under the State of India’s Birds initiative, covers the period from January 1, 2020, to May 31, 2024. During this, a comprehensive list of 349 species was recorded within the city, including 141 migratory species This extensive data collection highlights the rich avian diversity present in our urban environment.

Light has always been one of humanity’s finest discoveries. It was the burning of oil, after all, that lit the long nights of learning and labor, helping us become what we are intellectually and technologically today. Stories of great thinkers burning the midnight oil remind us how light became a necessary companion of knowledge, achievements and of the civilizations itself. But before oil lamps, candles and, much later, the invention of light bulbs and LEDs, Earth was an ent

Subjects like ecology, human ecology, environmental sciences, and environmental studies have rarely been considered “mainstream” academic...

Image 1: Urban spaces as testimonies of co-existence with giloy, monkeys, and kites in the backdrop of the majestic Ghazipur landfill...

“While we have been trying to save the world’s crumbling pre-urban ecosystem, we have been ignoring the fact that nature has already been...

I have always believed that flight—at least for humans—was inspired directly by nature. Perhaps it was the sight of a bird’s effortless...

It must be very hard to be a native tree in the city. Not just because of the consistently drastic environmental changes post-Industrial...

Cities are often portrayed as concrete jungles, lacking meaningful ecological value. However, this narrative erases the presence of...

In the fast-paced, concrete world of Delhi, it’s easy to overlook the fact that our city still chirps, and whistles with life. From flocks of wintering migratory birds to the everyday pigeons, kites, and barbets, Delhi remains a vibrant habitat—if only we pause to notice. But who gets to see  this biodiversity? Birds of Our City is a community-driven bird education initiative we’re thrilled to launch this August in collaboration with the Kranti Collective Library. This proje