Sometime in 2019, a fruit bat or a flying fox in the wooded region of Central Chinese province of Hubei, became host to a virus. Three years later, human society has changed beyond recognition – what with masks, sanitizing, social distancing, grief and anxiety about this pandemic never going away. With the wisdom of hindsight, the world now knows the very clear and present danger of zoonosis — infection passed on from animals and birds to human beings. Looking back, we can only wish the micro event was managed better.
Since the early 1990s, UN-Habitat, a United Nations agency focused on finding ways for cities to both provide adequate shelter for their teeming populations while minimizing the damage cities do to the environment, has stressed the importance of sustaining urban ecosystems. Any ecosystem, even the smallest puddle with a billion life forms and a million processes in action, thrives on equilibrium, on balance. And as nature can be paradoxical, equilibrium is often perceived in retrospect, that is, only after equilibrium has been disturbed. The costs of these disturbances to human society though are increasingly evident as the world is confronted by ever more zoonosis-driven epidemics and extreme weather events.
MBAC (Manipal Birding and Conservation Trust) — a collective of doctors, engineers, and volunteers from various other fields working in the town of Manipal in Udupi district — is attempting to premonish and avoid future disasters of urbanizing in a haphazard manner. In a study done after analysing data collected over three years, the team of citizen scientists, led by Dr.Prabhakar Sastri, Dr.Vrinda Lath and Dr.Mark Freston, have noted in painful detail the disastrous consequences that followed the cutting of trees for widening of the Highway NH169A that cuts through Manipal in October, 2019.
Manipal University has nearly 25,000 students from more than 60 countries on any day. Today parts of Manipal – with a population close to 50,000 – resemble those of an Indian metropolis, with little or no trace left of the forests that covered this hillock merely six decades ago. Manipal now an internationally famous educational hub, was a densely forested hillock. Indian Cormorants, one of the many migratory birds that pass through Coastal Karnataka, have are continuing nesting on trees in the heart of town despite the din of traffic, the mechanical drones, whirrs and screeching horns of vehicles. Urbane chaos notwithstanding, come monsoon, Manipal turns into a heronry. It has, after all, been for decades a communal nesting habitat for water birds, including herons, egrets, storks, and cormorants. The dominant group are the Indian cormorants, told apart from their little cousins by the bronze sheen over their backs and their sea-green irises. Additionally, the rain trees in the Kasturba Medical College campus serve as roosting trees to many species of bird including mynas, starlings, crows, little cormorants, egrets, pond herons and the black-headed ibis.
In October 2019, the construction of NH169A was underway, for which many trees were felled without any care or caution for the birds. Some of these trees were host to cormorant chicks not yet ready to fly the nest. Several of these chicks fell to their deaths, while those that survived gathered on the outer walls of a hospital block, their parents flying frantically overhead. These chicks, out of reach of the adult cormorants, survived for twelve hours with no access to food, until members of the Manipal Birders Club were notified of the incident. Aided by forest officials, the club members were able to relocate about fifty chicks to the lake, of which few were raised by the birders and forest department. Despite these efforts though, the chicks succumbed to disease, malnutrition and injury. The fate of the other twenty chicks, a little more mature and perhaps able to survive independently, could not be ascertained.
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A basic consultation with birding groups would have revealed something crucial. The Indian cormorants arrive in Manipal precisely at the end of July each year to build their nests. By February, the young ones fledge and leave their nests, to return the following year as their parents do. Had the tree cutting been postponed by three months, the carnage could have been avoided.
Steady loss of habitat
The MBAC team in its study has identified eight trees in the heart of the town with about 198 Cormorant nests. This data, worryingly, when compared to a survey conducted in 2016 by Rahul SN and Dwiref Oza (thirteen trees with 400 nests) showed a loss of over fifty percent of the nests resulting from a loss of less than fifty percent of the trees.
Risks of Zoonosis
The fear of zoonosis (transmission of diseases from animals to humans), the chances of which are higher when the natural system is disturbed by human activity. Avian flu and possibly even the SARS CoV2 pandemic have provided some hard lessons in that regard.
It is not just about our interactions with wildlife only, but our use of livestock also plays a role. In the case of the Spanish flu, it is widely held that the virus jumped from a pig on a military farm in Kansas, USA to the first known human case… the virus mutated from animals and was taken across the world by the movement of soldiers during the First World War. Ultimately, the Spanish flu killed more people than that devastating war,” notes Sunita Narain of Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) in her new book The Pandemic Journal: A prologue to a world that would never be the same again. “Zoonoses are emerging as the single biggest threat to human health, exacerbated by climate change. We are not prepared, as is evident from the COVID-19 pandemic” she further observes.
Note of caution
The rapid urbanization of once small towns and large-scale road expansions means we are actively replacing endemic flora with exotic fast-growing species without considering the long-term impact of our actions. Human beings as a species, are extremely well-equipped to register the larger picture. However, we also often fail to record and understand how grand manifestations often have the smallest triggers. Manipal is an eternally youthful place. Several generations of fine engineers, doctors, corporate minds and artists found their footing in Manipal. As will future generations. Leaving a place better than we found it, is something we owe to the next generation.
