Shooting the breeze with flamingos

Multi-faceted Urvi Piramal takes this paper for a spot of bird-watching in Mumbai's neighbourhood.

It takes some weeks to tie Urvi Piramal down to a morning of bird-watching but when we finally do, it proves to be a fortuitous delay.

As the chairperson of the Ashok Piramal Group and grandmother of four, she flits seamlessly between mill redevelopment and baking chocolate chip cookies. But today we are witness to another facet of her personality "" the keen wildlifer.

And since a visit to Tadoba National Park (near Nagpur) is out of question, where she, along with friend Hemendra Kothari (DSP Merrill Lynch), initiated a wildlife conservation trust in 2002, we pay the flamingos at Sewri a visit.

You just know when someone is an authentic wildlifer. Piramal has brought along her "safari" kit "" a pair of binoculars, a Canon EOS 5D, plenty of water, an umbrella (suitably branded "Crossroads") and an absolute essential, as we learn, a sun hat. In fact, as we left her Carmichael Road home, she was brought at least 10 solars to choose from.

Piramal has asked Anish Andheria, director (science, natural history and photography), Sanctuary magazine, along to benefit the undertaking. And he in turn has, in a wonderful stroke of luck for us, brought his Bushnell spotting scope.

Despite a delay on account of a circuitous route through the derelict port trust land that is Sewri, scattered with warehouses, scrap yards and abandoned factories, we arrive in perfect time. We get there just as the tide is threatening to come in, and the birds are moving inland, which makes for intimate viewing from the pier. Along the coastline, the wash of pink extends for at least a mile or two. Just the previous day a visitor estimated the numbers at 8,000.

The visiting birds have been making Sewri their winter home for, as far as is documented, the last 15 years. Another week or two and they'll have left on their journey back home to the Rann of Kutch.

Piramal tries to fit in a visit to Sewri each year, often accompanied by her grandchildren, who she hopes will imbibe some of her passion for the outdoors.

She owes a lot of her enthusiasm for the wild to her association with wildlife authority par excellence and the editor of Sanctuary magazine, Bittu Sehgal.

"Going out into the forest makes me feel alive. Everything else in my life seems inconsequential then," she explains.

A health setback meant she hasn't visited a forest in two years; she's developed itchy feet and is already planning a tiger-spotting sojourn in November with Sehgal and friends. We speak of the dwindling numbers of the magnificent beast and the even shallower reserves of public empathy for the cause.

"Still, a friend just spotted 13 tigers in one trip to Ranthambore," she says hopefully.

We're treated to a slightly less rare but equally exciting sighting of "displaying" by a large "pat" of male flamingos, a routine pre-breeding demonstration of virility. Piramal is keeping her camera busy.

"Did you know that flamingos's beaks act as a sieve to filter out the micro-organisms from water?" asks Andheria, who is a stock pile of wildlife trivia.

The Bushnell is a god-send, we're able to spot every speck of colour on the birds. Andheria also identifies 10 different birds within a few metres from us, some of whom are also migratory visitors. "I must make note in my diary," says Piramal, making a quick mental record.

A brave juvenile flamingo stands his ground as the others retreat from the rising waters, perhaps taking confidence from the graceful egret that stands incongruous among the pink.

The rest continue their ceaseless feeding. The bay water is pumped with effluents from refineries and factories creating an abundance of algae for the birds to feed on.

"It's slow poisoning because they are probably ingesting carcinogenic material," says Andheria. Of the six species of flamingos known to man, two are found in Sewri "" the Lesser and the Greater flamingo. The Greater flamingo stands tall at four feet, while at two feet, the Lesser is the smallest flamingo species.

Essential to their survival is the protection of the mangroves that line the coastline. However, this wetland habitat is in danger of being wiped out by the planned Mumbai-Nava Sheva road link.

"It's unbelievable that they're here despite everything: the destruction of the mangroves, human encroachment, changing climate," says Piramal.

Human consumption luckily isn't a large threat according to Andheria, although Piramal's driver mentions spotting a dead flamingo or two in the local meat market.

It's interesting to meet someone like Piramal when developers and environmentalists usually make for contentious bedfellows.

And Piramal is an active developer, especially on the specialised real estate side (Peninsula Land Ltd, headed by Piramal's son Rajeev) "" there's three mill redevelopment projects in Mumbai, three Special Economic Zones in Goa, a 100-acre SEZ in Pune.

"Everybody likes trashing development but how can we do without it? What we need is sustainable development," she says, almost as if predicting my thoughts. One certainly hopes that people like her will be able to demonstrate to the world that the two can indeed go together.