
Look at animal movement with more generosity

Summary
Animal movement is crucial for survival, yet often misunderstood as deviant behavior. Embracing wildlife's natural instincts is key to harmonious coexistence with natureOn a daily lunch walk in Delhi in January, I see a little bird, winking like a light. It has a grey head, but most of its body is a bright lemon-yellow. It sits on top of an iron fence on a wall, and then it flies towards the left, or the right, chasing an insect only it can see. Triumphant and swallowing its catch, it comes back to its perch, having flown in a circle, the fence a point on the circle’s circumference. It repeats this grasping flight several times, resembling a dance step rather than a lethal hunt. This movement is called sallying. The Grey-headed canary flycatcher is a juggler, executing three things at once—dashing and diving, hunting its prey, avoiding collision with things. And sallying isn’t the only reason why this graceful tornado astonishes me: It’s also because the bird is migratory, having come to the city from the Himalaya in winter.
As I watch the flycatcher, I also hear squeaks from the trees, high and insect-like. The narrow leaves of a jamun tree move, and I am able to see a round, greenish-brown body hurtling through the leaves, jumping from branch to branch with a feeling of urgency. Small birds have a speed that seems to say they don’t have much time; they must barrel through a world bristling with threats. The bird is a Hume’s warbler, migrating from Central Asia ranges even beyond the Himalaya.
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Recently, newspapers have been full of the news of wild animals seemingly running. Large cats have been crisscrossing paths with people, voyaging into new places, crossing over state boundaries. A tigress was taken to Simlipal Tiger Reserve in Odisha, in an attempt to boost the population of the reserve. But perhaps she didn’t like it. She crossed over to Jharkhand, and then to West Bengal. It took about three weeks to catch her. She was handed back to Odisha, and a few days ago, she was released back in Simlipal. There are reports of another tiger in Jhargram in West Bengal, who might have come from Jharkhand. From Madhya Pradesh’s Kuno National Park, a cheetah was seen walking through Sheopur town, ambling through streets. A tiger from Sariska Tiger Reserve walked over 100 kilometres to Jhabua in Haryana (until he was caught in November last year and taken back to Sariska like a truant schoolboy).
These animals are often called “strays" by the media and in official reports. The implication is the animal is behaving in a deviant manner, a criminal manner almost.
And yet, movement is important for many animals, and life-giving for some. Some sharks need to swim to survive—their breathing is connected to movement in the water. Tigers will explore new areas to find their own territories. Elephants will move over large areas to find adequate food and water. Migratory birds must move in order to complete their life cycles—in our hemisphere this usually means breeding in the north during summer, and coming to warm places in winter.
For us too, movement has great meaning; it portrays a particular preference. We might live in cities, but we move to a particular place and climate of our choice (much like a wintering bird) when we can. For me, that is a magnolia tree on an old property in Uttarakhand, cheek by jowl with a bustling hill station. We visit a run-down café for nostalgia’s sake, go for a difficult mountain trek, retreat into solitude. Our movements are often seen as quests, as important choices to be made in adult life—where will we settle? What will we settle for? For so many of us, travel is a lifeline that makes sense of the rest of life’s absurdities.
And so: we must look at animal movement with more generosity. Wildlife exploring is wildlife making sense of the world. It is not, in fact, a barb at our notions of control. We must allow movement, and the temporary churn that comes with it; land-use that permits quick animal movement is clever land-use.
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In December 2024, I walked along a mountainside looking for migratory eagles. Within a ruffle of Himalayan griffon vultures, there was an eagle from Central Asia. This was the Steppe eagle, a bird that makes long flights to come south towards India each year. On another December a few years ago, I saw a Steppe eagle on an unusual hill—the lip of a man-made mountain, the garbage landfill of Bhalswa in Delhi. The bird was trying to scavenge. It seemed a terrible pity that a magnificent bird of prey, just off its long migration, would pick at trash in a dirty heap. It reminded me that migratory birds have several potential threats in their journeys—electric lines (which they collide into), poisoning, overall habitat degradation. The journeys are dangerous, they can also be life-threatening. They are here today, gone tomorrow. Wetlands full of migrating geese fall silent in summer; birders love the sight, they also miss it. And at the back of their minds is a niggling feeling—they don’t know whether they will see the same bird, or that flock of birds, again.

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Wild animals negotiate mounting challenges in their ecosystems—natural or modified, healthy or warming. They require consideration from us. They also require means in which this movement can be made easier—from high, large underpasses under road projects to levelled areas on steep banks, to nurturing drainage systems that don’t lead to complete flooding of ever-shrinking habitats or channels, to maintaining ecological flows in rivers and streams, to restoring animal corridors, to preventing capture of animals without the advice of ecologists.
In 2019, scientists from the Russian Raptor Research and Conservation Network went bankrupt on their Steppe eagle project. They had fitted GPS-GSM trackers on 13 birds. When they came in mobile range, SMSes were sent to the scientists. This was budgeted for; however, some birds decided to take “detours" or longer paths (one bird stayed for a long time in Iran). This meant huge roaming charges. There was almost no money to carry on, and so the scientists put out an emergency crowdfunding call. An online community rallied to save the project, but there was also a lesson here. Movement can’t be predicted, only monitored or managed. Movement is its own kind of freedom. Exploratory tigers and migrating eagles are signs that the natural world needs choice in ways that we might recognise; that an animal’s choice in a loud world is also a choice that should count.
As I finish writing, I hear a migratory warbler again. I search but I can’t see it, and I wonder if I will hear it again in the same place next January. I head homewards like so many others, on their own journeys and detours—and I realise then that we are not so different, us and the birds.
Neha Sinha is a conservation biologist and author of Wild And Wilful: Tales Of 15 Iconic Indian Species.
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