NEWS

The offloading of Pune’s garbage at Urali Devachi might be a cause for much angst among the villagers, but the dump has turned a surprisingly welcome sight for ornithologists. A variety of migratory birds have, in recent years, been using it as a resting site owing to garbage dump’s thermal heat that helps in conserving their energy for the next soaring flight.

A scientific study done by Pune’s ornithologists titled ‘Metropolitan garbage dumps: possible winter migratory raptor monitoring stations in peninsular India’ was published in September in the Journal of Threatened Taxa. Interestingly, the peer-reviewed magazine, for the first time, also published the abstract in Marathi.

Migratory birds like tawny eagle, steppe eagle and black-eared kite prefer to rest near the dump or simply hover there after flying thousands of miles at a stretch, says researcher Dr Satish Pande, who along with co-authors Amit Pawashe, Niranjan Sant, Anil Mahabal and Neelesh Dahanukar proposed how urban areas are generating new ecosystems.