I have a tree on Cookson Road. I do not own it, for I live in a flat. But I consider it mine because it is a benign, looming presence in my life. It is an old, gnarly tree, perhaps 70-years-old, perhaps older. Strong and tall, it soars above the balcony of my second-floor flat in Richards Town, Bangalore.
My tree is a Rain Tree. The scientists call it Samanea saman. It is a migrant, coming to us from distant Latin America, where—according to a US botanist called James Duke—the great revolutionary Simon Bolivar once parked his entire liberation army under the massive canopy of a “saman de Guerra”, or tree of war. It is, more than any other, the tree that defines the idea of Bangalore. For a century, the Rain Tree has created lush, shady tunnels over roads famed for their absence of sunlight.
Sadly, these marvellous Rain Tree tunnels are diminishing, as the great trees are brought down to widen roads and allow new buildings or they are quietly pruned—branch by giant branch—until one day only an immense, woody stump remains.
My tree is intact, one of a rank of Rain Trees growing unhindered in my neighbourhood. Once a week, I peer at its vast canopy, trying to figure out the rough proportion of new leaves to old, if birds and monkeys pursue its fruit and whether it is flowering. As I write this, I notice my tree is full of feathery, pink flowers. There are too many to count. I record these observations and upload them to a website called www.seasonwatch.in. My tree is one of more than 2,000 being watched across India, as part of a project run out of the National Centre for Biological Sciences. The crowdsourcing effort hopes to find answers to some disquieting questions, such as: Why is my tree flowering frequently?
At this time, the trees are flowering all over Bangalore, in a riot of yellow, purple, red and pink—tabebuias, copperpods, cassias, jacarandas, gulmohars and those Rain Tree flowers on my tree. They are comforting—these bursts of colour in a once-colourful city that is greying and hardening into a concrete monster.
Yet, the simultaneous flowering of 2013 is alarming. When avenue trees were chosen for Bangalore about a century ago by its chief horticulturist, a diligent, astute German botanist called Gustav Hermann Krumbiegel, care was taken to ensure the species flowered at different times of the year, so that at any time there was some tree in bloom.
It is too early for a scientific study of the concurrent flowering. Expert speculation, as reported in the popular media, appears to be that Bangalore’s trees are stressed. This stress, caused by falling groundwater levels possibly, is prompting the trees to frantically flower, which is nothing but a manifestation of the natural urge to reproduce while they still can.
There are other indications that nature itself is feeling the anxiety of rapid and massive change in Indian cities. Earlier this week, The Times of India reported how ecologists from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) discovered cuckoos singing at night and frogs altering croaking patterns to make their voices heard, above the din of traffic, to their confused mates. Birds are trying to adapt, IISc researchers say, to the effects of air pollution. Ceaseless traffic is making the air warmer and less dense, which means birdsong cannot travel as long and easily as it once did. Anecdotally, it appears breeding is being limited and is moving out of the cities. So, if you hear birds unnervingly active at night—as I certainly do—it could be because they have found it is the best time to make themselves heard. Many species appear to be affected.
Earlier this month, Dr Anthony P.U., a zoologist, wrote how a bird called the Rosy Pastor—a kind of starling with a rose-hued chest and black hood, so named because of its habit of looking down, like a robed, preaching pastor—was arriving in Bangalore from south-east Europe a month earlier each year since 2011.
That urban India’s environment is changing is apparent. But how much of this is can be attributed to microclimatic change, such as the creation of urban heat islands, and to global warming is hard to discern.
An army of scientists would be needed to find out how rapidly changing temperature and rainfall patterns are affecting trees and birds. This is why SeasonWatch hopes that an army of students and adults can help convert impressions and anecdotes to “solid information”, as their website explains, “by systematically recording the changing patterns of plant life and understanding how climate affects their life cycle”.
And so, I stand every week before my rain tree, notebook in hand, staring, counting, thinking. I don’t know if I and others like me are making any difference. I hope we are.
Samar Halarnkar is a Bangalore-based journalist. This is a fortnightly column that explores the cutting edge of science and technology. Comments are welcome at frontiermail@livemint.com. To read Samar Halarnkar’s previous columns, go to www.livemint.com/frontiermail-
