A year when Nature has fought for survival

January 2025.

- NEHA SINHA

An Oriental magpie-robin with a Yellow-footed green pigeon; and (right) an Indian eagle owl in the Aravalli hills.

A Steppe eagle, a migratory bird of prey from Central Asia, soars high over the Aravalli hills. As we watch, it coasts in the air, and then locks its gaze on a garbage mountain that is taller than the surrounding hills.At Bandhwari landfill near prosperous Gurugram, the Steppe eagle dives to forage for pickings. If it sickens on refuse, we will never know, as it carries on its continental journey.

February 2025. Caught in a sudden storm, we hear a screech that cuts through the din of horns and the swish of the rain in Delhi. Above the conference area of the India Habitat Centre, a Barn owl hoots as dusk descends. In the daytime, Alexandrine parakeets haunt the same area, making as much noise as we do in the city.

March 2025. A team of us are at Rushikulya beach in Odisha. The beach has had an incredible event—the mass nesting of Olive Ridley turtles, something that doesn’t happen at scale every year. There are hundreds of thousands of eggs in the stripe of sand in front of us, lit by the moon. We wait for more turtles—all mothers—to arrive. In a fraught, warming world and beaches ringed with ships, it seems miraculous that turtles can swim long distances to lay eggs, not just alone, but together, supporting entire populations.

April 2025. The press is full of the news of young, gamboling “direwolf” pups—which are actually modified grey wolf pups—engineered to "bring back” extinct direwolves in the US. I’ve felt the pull of the idea that technology can solve all our problems, and then have remembered that wild wolves in the real world are persecuted on nearly every continent they are found in. Europe is nervous with wolves expanding their territories, in India wolves are seen as the thieves of livestock. I decide to visit a wolf site later in the year.