‘Bengaluru used to be a magical city for urban ecology, but not anymore’ Premium

At a nature camp in Bengaluru’s Cubbon Park, when he was still a young boy, Dr. K.S. Gopi Sundar, now based in Belagavi, had two encounters that would transform his life. While walking through the park he saw the golden oriole for the first time through a pair of binoculars. Till then, he thought that birds like this only existed in the Amazon. Then, a few minutes later, he saw a pair of blue Indian wanderer butterflies.

At a nature camp in Bengaluru’s Cubbon Park, when he was still a young boy, Dr. K.S. Gopi Sundar, now based in Belagavi, had two encounters that would transform his life. While walking through the park he saw the golden oriole for the first time through a pair of binoculars. Till then, he thought that birds like this only existed in the Amazon. Then, a few minutes later, he saw a pair of blue Indian wanderer butterflies.

“My world changed,” says Sundar, who joined Bangalore’s Birdwatchers’ Field Club soon after. 

There was no looking back from there for the ecologist, who grew up in Bengaluru. Sundar completed a B.Sc. in Environmental Sciences at St. Joseph’s College (now St. Joseph’s University) and followed it up with a master’s in Ecology at Pondicherry University. In 1998, he began working on the sarus crane, the world’s tallest flying bird, as part of a project with the Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun. “I saw my first sarus on the train on my way there...close to Mathura,” says Sundar, who, some years later, joined the University of Minnesota for a PhD in conservation biology. 

Today, Sundar is a National Geographic Explorer, the editor-in-chief of an international journal titled Waterbirds: the International Journal of Waterbird Biology, and the co-chair of the IUCN Stork, Ibis and Spoonbill Specialist Group, and is known for his research on large waterbirds, especially sarus cranes. He serves on several state wildlife boards and court-appointed committees related to conservation in India and has over 100 published papers to his credit.

The most recent is a co-authored paper titled Characteristics of Bird Niches in a Small Indian City: Effects of Migratory Status, Season and Environment Variables published in the Journal of Urban Ecology in September 2024. 

In a recent interview with The Hindu in Bengaluru, he spoke about the new study and what he has learnt from his research about the coexistence of birds with humans in India.