With a tree festival and bird-watching marathon scheduled over the coming week, it won’t be just planes that will keep citizens engrossed.
The third edition of Neralu, a citizen-led urban tree festival, will be held on Saturday and Sunday.
This time, the festival will see ‘tree walks’ led by field botanists, avid naturalists, and experts at various neighbourhoods of the city on Saturday. The walks will be held at 13 places, covering famous tree copses of Cubbon Park, Sankey Tank, M.N. Krishna Rao Park, Cooke’s Town, Yelahanka to HSR Layout and Whitefield, said a release.
Apart from this, seminars and performances, story-telling and dance — all centred around trees — will be held at Cubbon Park Metro Station and National Gallery for Modern Art. On Sunday, at NGMA, visitors can participate in a “conversation with trees” — an audio walk through what the trees are ‘thinking’ — as well as “walking with Swami and his friend”, a tribute to R.K. Narayan and R.K. Laxman told through the giant trees on the campus.
Watching birds
Meanwhile, the Great Backyard Bird Count, among the largest citizen-science projects to enumerate bird species, returns between February 17 and 20. While the initiative, started in 2013, sought to involve citizens with the winged denizens of their areas, a release said the annual snapshots of bird populations generated through the events, helped answer a variety of important scientific questions, including distribution of birds and change in bird populations.
The initiative encourages people to spend 15 minutes, listing and counting all the birds seen in their neighbourhood. The data is then fed into the ebird website.
For those who want to be initiated into the patient art of watching birds, three ‘birding walks’ have been listed: Nandi Hills (Friday, 7 p.m.), Jakkur Lake (Saturday, 7 a.m.) and Kaikondrahalli Lake (Saturday, 3.45 p.m.).
