Sahyadrica

The Corbett Foundation and Earthwatch Institute (India) have come up with an easy-to-use app called Spider Watch that looks at 50 common species of spiders belonging to 23 families found in India – whether you’re in a city, a garden, or a sanctuary – you’re likely to find them there. This app was made to facilitate on-field identification of common spiders of India, with an objective to bring these little tigers of the undergrowth to the forefront, and to inculcate further interest in them. Just search for “Spider Watch” on Google Play store from your android phones, or follow this link . Its usage is fairly simple. Here are some screenshots of the app: This is the title page, of course. Once you're through the app, you will come across such a page. The "play" symbol on the top left corner will run you through this page, or you can scroll down by yourself. The one with a magnifying glass symbol will take you to a new window showing thumbnails of all spid...

by Adithi Muralidhar Mumbai is a city I look up to when I think of a forest in a city. I fancy its long but recent natural history, of tigers roaming the islands, sloth bears digging into termite mounds, and leopards that once lived in harmony with humans. Most, if not all, is now lost. As I read Dr Salim Ali’s autobiography The Fall of a Sparrow (ch. Special Providence, pp. 4–5) , I came to realise that Mumbai did not lose its charm until recently. What caught my attention was his recount of Chembur, a part of Mumbai Metropolis, and probably one of the busiest corners of the city today. In his own words, “[…] Chembur – now a noisy part of the metropolitan Bombay but in those days a delightfully quiet sylvan haven of secondary moist-deciduous jungle set among outlying hillocks of the Western Ghats [...] It was thickly wooded in parts till uniformly denuded into a veritable Rock of Gibraltar by the relentless fuel-hunters.” My association with Mumbai is mostly intact because of it...