Youngsters in college are most often glued to their cellphones and selfies, classes, canteen and fashion. But students Pradeep V. Hegde and Sathya Chandra Sagar H.S. of Christ University decided to look around their campus with their binoculars. Little did they imagine that over a period of two years they would discover that their 25-acre campus would yield 59 species of butterflies, 55 species of birds, and 14 kinds of ants.
That’s how Guhanagari - A Book On Urban Wildlife , took birth. Pradeep from Sirsi, and Sagar from Chikmagalur, both wildlife enthusiasts, finished college last year. While Pradeep is currently working on several conservation films and projects, Sagar is pursuing his Masters course in France. “We both grew up in our hometowns seeing butterflies and birds in abundance. But when we came to Bengaluru for the first time to live and study, we realised people here were not so aware of the kind of biodiversity around them. We started observing and documenting on campus,” says Pradeep.
While Pradeep who studied biotechnology, botany and chemistry but was interested in media and films handled the photography for the book, Sagar, who studied chemistry, botany and zoology and was more interested in research and conservation, wrote the text.
The University had a group called the Green Army, but both Pradeep and Sagar felt that they were not reaching out to enough people, so they decided to put down their discoveries in the form of a book. A whole lot of students on campus pitched in with help on the book. “Initially we started it off as a coffee-table book, but funding it became an issue. So our college suggested we do it as a smaller book and offered to publish it,” says Pradeep. They spent their first and second year of their degree course documenting. And in their third year they started working on layouts. “Since we didn’t have the money to afford a designer, we taught ourselves In Design. Guhanagari is a result of three years of intensive work, thousands of photographs, multiple revisions, innumerable field trips, bundles of field notes and sleepless nights. Ultimately, it has turned out to be a guide to every species that can be found in Christ University.” It helped that college had free Wifi and they could spend time on campus from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.
The book, he says is also meant to invoke a sense of respect and admiration for life forms around us; to create a sense of hope that we still have a chance at harmony, even at the height of the ecological crises today. “A lot of people think wildlife is going to national parks and seeing elephants,” he rues. “And we know so little about urban biodiversity.” He quotes an example of the Neoscona Spider they discovered on campus. “We always saw it during the day and it would never move. Then on an evening walk we found it building its web. We researched and found that this spider weaves its web every evening to hunt, then eats the prey and the web (high in protein) by morning and goes back to sleep in the same place!”
The book, priced at Rs. 185, is presently available for sale at Christ University. email: pradeephegde8722@gmail
.com .
