The Vanishing Birds Of Mumbai And The Need For Conservation

The first light of dawn spills over the mangroves of Thane Creek, painting the water in shades of amber and rose. For millennia, this has been the hour of arrival, the moment when wings that have crossed mountains, deserts, and oceans finally touch down in the great coastal expanse that Mumbai calls home. But these days, the dawn is quieter. The air, once thick with the calls of a hundred species, now carries only the distant rumble of construction and the relentless hum of a city consuming itself. And flamingos are nowhere in sight.

Prathamesh Desai, founder of Jungle Buddies, has spent years walking these wetlands with binoculars and a deep, patient love for what flies. What he has witnessed in the last few decades is not merely a decline, it is a disappearance. "In the last few years and decades, birds, both native and migratory to Mumbai, have seen a sharp fall in numbers, and some have even disappeared," Desai said. "Why so? The decline really comes down to a few compounding factors, but the biggest culprit is the rapid loss of our micro-habitats. Mumbai isn't just concrete and coastline; historically, it had a beautiful mosaic of scrublands, open grasslands, and dense mangroves. As the city expands, these areas are often dismissed as 'wastelands' and cleared."

These so-called wastelands are where the city's original inhabitants thrived. The Red Spurfowl, once a familiar presence in the undergrowth of Sanjay Gandhi National Park, has become a ghost. The Ashy Woodswallow, the White-naped Woodpecker, the Heart-spotted Woodpecker, names that now appear more frequently in old field guides than in the notebooks of birders. During the 2014 bird race at SGNP, not a single participant reported seeing the Black-headed Cuckooshrike, the Large Cuckooshrike, the Verditer Flycatcher, or the Blue-capped Rock Thrush. A decade later, the silence has only deepened.

The latest census by the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS), released in February 2026, revealed 1,21,000 flamingos inhabiting Mumbai. These results were concluded from the flamingo census conducted in January 2019, the BNHS report showed. The numbers are 1/4th what it used to be 10-15 years back, observers and experts said.

The Buried Wetlands

In Seven Bungalows in Andheri, a lake that throbbed with life is now entombed beneath a Metro Yard. Water, reeds, and birds, all gone, not in the gradual process of natural decay but with the finality of concrete and rails. A few kilometers away, Lokhandwala Lake is dying a slow death with the invasion of concrete waste dumped in the process of constructing buildings in the surroundings. Water levels are shrinking; birds are disappearing.

The vast campus of IIT in Powai, a haven for bird enthusiasts, has been reduced in size with the construction of new buildings and the rise of the walls of improved security. A living classroom in biodiversity has been transformed into yet another enclave where human ambition is supreme over all other forms of life.

Tarzon Lake at Charkop, the very place that initiated countless Mumbaikars into the world of birding, no longer exists in the form it used to exist. Its waters have been replaced by construction, and its surrounding mangroves are being razed for the Versova-Bhayander coastal road. Each fallen mangrove is a blow to the intricate web of life that sustains not only birds but the city itself.

Dr. Raju Kasambe, former Assistant Director at the Bombay Natural History Society, has watched these losses accumulate with a mixture of sorrow and frustration. "The number of birds has gone down in Mumbai and Mumbai Metropolitan Region," he states plainly. "This is because small ponds, wetlands and periphery are being concretised in the name of beautification. Some birds like crow, pigeons and gulls survive in the city because people feed them food like ghatiya and other things. But other bird species are declining because their natural habitat is being destroyed."

The Flamingo Story

There is one bird whose numbers in Mumbai have increased dramatically: the flamingo. At first glance, this might seem like a conservation success story. But as Desai explains, the truth is far more troubling. "The spike in their population is a direct result of increased pollution in the creek," he said. "The pollutants feed the specific algae that flamingos eat, causing the algae to multiply. So, ironically, more pollution equals more food, which doubles the flamingo numbers. It is a clear sign of an unbalanced ecosystem."

These flamingos arrive from Kutch between November and mid-June, joining a host of other migratory birds: Pacific golden plovers, painted storks, black-tailed godwits, Eurasian curlews, northern shovellers, northern pintails, lesser whistling ducks, garganey, spot-billed ducks, ruddy shelducks. They come to the creeks at Thane, Airoli, and Vashi, seeking rest and refuge. They find instead a landscape under siege.

The creeks depend on three large roosting sites along their eastern coast: TS Chanakya, NRI Colony, and Panje Funde. During high tide, when the creek waters rise, flamingos retreat to these wetlands to rest. During low tide, they return to feed. This rhythm, older than the city itself, has sustained them for generations.

Blocked Tides, Broken Flows

Since 1971, CIDCO has been responsible for transforming Navi Mumbai into a thriving urban landscape. With every new structure built, every new road constructed, something of the pre-existing environment has been changed, altered, or destroyed. The question of whether urbanization and wild life can coexist has been answered in a negative sense, not because it is impossible, but because no one bothered to try.

The Thane-Airoli-Vashi creek system is flanked by a series of buffer mangrove forests and water bodies that serve a double purpose. They are home to wild life, yes. But they also serve as natural sponges that soak up tidal flows and prevent flooding in the cities. When tidal flows are halted, as they have been in the NRI Seawoods Complex Talawe wetlands and the TS Chanakya wetlands, what is the result?

"Water flow has been recently blocked at NRI Seawoods Complex Talawe wetlands and TS Chanakya wetlands, shrinking them to less than 25% of what they used to be," Desai noted. The Talawe wetlands, once a vibrant congregation point for flamingos, have seen their numbers plummet. The birds that once filled the air with pink and white have been driven away by disturbances from building and construction, by the shrinking of their resting places, by the quiet violence of human encroachment.

A similar fate has befallen a water body near Delhi Public School in Navi Mumbai. Though a pipeline has now been put in place for water to flow, it has not been very effective. The migratory birds that used to rest and roost in this area have not returned in such large numbers. The Sewri mudflats, an important area for migratory birds, have lost much space in the making of the Atal Setu bridge. The Panje Funde wetlands continue to be under threat from blocked tidal flows and land reclamation around JNPT. Birders are not allowed in these areas now. "Many of us have stopped going there," Desai said, an acknowledgment of failure from those who once fought to bear witness.

The Government's Blind Eye

Despite the mounting evidence, the disappearing species, the shrinking wetlands, the blocked tidal flows, government intervention has been sporadic at best, performative at worst. Tree-planting drives, when they occur, often prioritize exotic, ornamental species that offer no nutritional value to native birds. Builders transplant trees not for ecological benefit but for show, relocating specimens to places where their ground and habitat are unsuitable.

"The builders who are planting trees in places near construction are more for show purposes and hardly serve the real purpose," Dr. Kasambe said. "Alongside the builders, government authorities who relocate trees which are 10-15 years old and are being planted anywhere and at places where their ground and habitat are not suitable."

The salt-pans that line Mumbai's coast, critical resting and nesting sites for birds along the Central Asian Flyway, are being commercialized. Bhapdup and Vashi Salt-Pan, Chanakya, Upper Thane Creek, these names appear on conservation lists and on development blueprints, and development is winning.

"Mumbai's coast lies on the Central Asian Flyway," Dr. Kasambe emphasized. "The city's coast serves as a key halt location for these birds to rest and nest. But if these places are not taken care of with care and time and being the good host to these birds, these birds will go to Central Asia and later to places like Siberia and hence the population of these birds will come down."

Urbanisation Hitting Hard

Urbanisation has not simply reduced bird populations; it has fundamentally altered the shape of bird life in Mumbai. The specialist species, those with specific habitat requirements, are being replaced by generalists, creating a biological homogenization that masks the deeper ecological unraveling.

"We are losing our 'specialist' species at an alarming rate," Desai explained. "For instance, the number of migrating raptors like the Steppe Eagle has declined drastically across the Mumbai region. Similarly, the Pied Avocet, which used to be a very common winter visitor at Thane Creek, has been rarely seen for the past two to three years. Even our resident forest raptors are taking a hit; the Changeable Hawk-Eagle, a bird of prey species native to Sanjay Gandhi National Park and surrounding forests, is now a very rare sight."

The list of birds with declining sightings reads like a roll call of absence: Rufous Treepie, Plum-headed Parakeet, Tawny-bellied Babbler, Loten's Sunbird, Spangled Drongo, White-bellied Drongo, Black Redstart, all the lark species, Eurasian Oystercatcher, Ruddy Turnstone, Forest Wagtail, Nakta or Comb Duck, Common Kestrel, and several other raptors. These are not obscure species known only to specialists, they are the birds that once filled Mumbai's skies, its scrublands, its wetlands, and its very identity.

In order to understand what it is that we are losing, it is necessary to go back in time to a day when Mumbai was at the forefront of ornithological studies in the country. That was the era of the legendary Dr. Salim Ali, the Birdman of India, who in his years at the BNHS pioneered the science of bird conservation in the country.

Salim Ali was not just a man of science; he was a man of vision, a man who realized that you cannot protect what you don't understand. In the 1960s, under his stewardship, India saw some of the most ambitious bird ringing and tagging exercises in the country's history. Thousands of birds were tagged with small metal bands, their movements tracked across the world, and the secrets of the migratory patterns of birds revealed to the world. We learned where the birds came from, where they stopped to refuel, and how they navigated the Central Asian Flyway that takes them through the creeks and mangroves of Mumbai.

But that legacy has faded.

Mrugank Prabhu, a former scientist at the Bombay Natural History Society and a senior bird researcher, speaks of this loss with a mixture of nostalgia and urgency. "We have very little data and research facilities to understand bird migration, their fuel stop patterns and other related things," he says. "Bird tagging and bird ringing is the need of the hour to understand the patterns of migratory birds. In the 1960s, during Salim Ali's time, we had some mass bird ringing and tagging to get the data and understand migratory birds' patterns. But after that, we have not been able to do anything of that level."

The absence of such research is not merely an academic gap. Without understanding exactly how migratory birds use Mumbai's wetlands, which sites are critical for refueling, what routes they take, how changing conditions affect their journeys, conservation efforts operate in the dark. Decisions about development are made without the scientific evidence needed to argue for alternative sites or protective measures. When a wetland is drained or a tidal flow is blocked, the precise impact on bird populations remains unmeasured, unremarked, unacknowledged.

"We have very little data," Prabhu said, the words carrying the weight of decades of missed opportunities. In the decades since Salim Ali's pioneering work, the scale of bird research in the region has never regained that momentum. The birds continue to arrive, but we no longer track them with the rigor they deserve. We are failing to be good hosts, not only in protecting their habitats but even in understanding what those habitats mean to them.

The Central Asian Flyway has been a highway of wings for millennia. Birds that breed in Siberia, in Mongolia, in the great steppes of Central Asia, have always looked southward toward the Indian subcontinent, toward its coasts and creeks and wetlands. Mumbai has been a host, a resting place, a winter home. But a host that fails to care for its guests will soon find itself alone.

The decline of birds in Mumbai and Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) is not an accident. It is the cumulative result of decisions made, and not made, by governments that have prioritized infrastructure over ecology, development over biodiversity, concrete over life. When tidal flows are blocked, when wetlands are drained, when scrublands are dismissed as wasteland, when the rhythm of tide and wing is broken, something irreplaceable is lost.

The birds that are disappearing from Mumbai's skies will not return on their own. They require action: the identification and protection of biodiversity zones, the restoration of tidal flows, the planting of native species, the revival of scientific research on the scale that Salim Ali once championed. They require a government that does not turn a blind eye, that does not intervene only rarely and reluctantly, that recognizes that a city which destroys its natural heritage is a city destroying itself, all of the quoted experts argued.

For now, the dawns grow quieter. The wetlands shrink. The birds, one by one, are unseen. And Mumbai, that great and relentless city, continues to build upon the very ground that once sustained it, unaware, perhaps, that in losing its birds, it is losing a part of itself that can never be replaced.