The Thing About Wildlife

I am joined by my guest co-host, Tanmay Wagh, who you all met last Season as part of episode 21: The Thing About Marine Adventures! Together, we speak to two fabulous members of the Andaman and Nicobar Environment Team at the Dakshin Foundation - James Tirkey and Babu Kutty. James is the Base Coordinator and a Field Assistant at ANET. He has extensive research experience - having assisted on sever...

Dr Elrika D'Souza is the Programme Manager of Oceans and Coasts at the Nature Conservation Foundation. Her research interests lie in exploring plant-animal interactions in seagrass ecosystems. Elrika has documented historical declines in dugong populations in the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago, and has worked towards identifying the reasons that led to that very decline. Presently, her research i...

Today, I speak with the dedicated and observant, Dr Arijit Pal, a postdoctoral fellow at the national institute of advanced studies in bangalore. For the past decade, Arijit has been closely studying the Nicobar long-tailed macaques of Great Nicobar Island. He was one of the first primatologists to venture into this space in order to study a species we knew next to nothing about. Today he is conti...

Shiba Desor is a social scientist who worked with the Karen community in the middle Andamans  to set up the Andaman Karen Crafts initiative, a cooperative to promote cultural continuity and environmental conservation through weaving, artisanal crafts, tree nurseries and a local-cuisine restaurant. Shiba has previously worked with forest rights policy and livelihoods as well, and now continues...

We're back today with another in our Andaman and Nicobar series, with a conversation featuring Professor Pankaj Sekhsaria. His main areas of research lie at the intersection of environment, science and society and he is incredibly driven when it comes to issues of the environment and wildlife conservation across the country. He is also an incredible and prolific writer and storyteller, and you can...

Madhuri Ramesh is a faculty member at the School of Development at Azim Premji University. Madhuri has worked in deserts, rainforests, coasts and islands, she’s a herpetologist who turned to political ecology for her PhD and later work. Her research in the Andaman Islands focuses on nature-society relations, and the consequences of these negotiations for conservation and sustainability.

Manish is a phenomenal storyteller, who uses his lived experiences to talk about the people and ecology of the islands with extreme clarity. Our recording with Manish ran into hours, and so I'll be bringing his voice to you in two parts. In the first epsiode featuring Manish, The Thing About Discovering The Islands, he talks to us about how he stumbled into the Andamans nearly three decades ago, w...

In the first episode of our Andaman and Nicobar series, storyteller-supreme, Manish Chandi speaks to Ishika and Akshay about his early years in the islands through riveting anecdotes. Manish Chandi, an affiliate with the Andaman and Nicobar Environment Team and Nature Conservation Foundation. In the last 25 years, Manish has worked on a wide range of projects in the region: herpetological surveys,...

Happy 2023, listeners! This year, The Thing About Wildlife is kick-starting with a 10-part series on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Stay tuned for more!

Order The Living Museum today! To know more about the book, head on over to our website . This production and distribution of this book was made possible with the support of Bengaluru Sustainability Forum , Nagarathna Memorial Grant and published by the Foundation for Ecological Research, Advocacy and Learning . Artwork for the book and the episode thumbnail by Sunaina Coleho .

After a little break, TTAW is back with The Thing About Reflections #2, where I'm joined by guest co-host Dr Krishna Anujan to look back upon Season 2. We spoke about the range of guests and topics we had on the podcast and dissected this season's highlights and shortcomings. We also fantasized about upcoming episodes and seasons.  Let us know your thoughts and feedback too! Write to us at th...

Tejaswini Nagesh is a product designer who works with the World Wide Fund for Nature - India in Tezpur. Her current work focuses on understanding the factors that contribute to elephant collisions with trains in Assam, so as to minimize them as far as possible. She is on a mission to explore how she can bring her unique skill set to this field of wildlife conservation through creative collaboratio...

Labonie Roy is a multi-media illustrator and educational content designer with a passion for nature-based learning. She has worked alongside various environment and education initiatives to bring both children and adults closer to nature through creative perspectives like upcycling, art and theatre. You can see a lot of her work featured in the educational content at Nature Classrooms , an initiat...

Munib Khanyari has just emerged from having completed his fascinating doctoral work in the Himalayas. He did his PhD from the University of Bristol/University of Oxford, and has been associated with the High Altitudes Program at the Nature Conservation Foundation as a Research Scholar for quite some time. His work focuses on the ungulates of the mountains – how they survive, how they interact with...

Parvathi K Prasad is a Research Affiliate at Conservation Initiatives and PhD student at Deakin University . She began her journey into this field through a human-animal interactions project in the Western Ghats with the Centre for Wildlife Studies , following which, she found her way to the dynamic ecosystems of Assam in Northeast India. After being introduced to Kaziranga and its megaherbivores,...

Ayushi Jain is a National Geographic Photo Ark EDGE Fellow focusing on the endangered Cantor’s giant softshell turtle, which is part of the work she first began during her master's research. Her primary research interests lie in community ecology, behavioural ecology, and evolution of various morphological and physiological traits in reptiles. Ayushi’s project aims to collect baseline ecological d...

Misha Bansal works with the Nature Conservation Foundation. After doing a Bachelor’s in Biochemistry and a Master’s in Life Sciences, Misha fell in love with birds through some early research work in the Aravallis in Delhi where she grew up. Ever since, she’s worked with various organizations to facilitate outreach and outdoor learning, most currently with the Early Bird program. Through her work...

Tanmay Wagh is a marine ecologist with the Dakshin Foundation who has been working in the Andaman Islands since 2013. Ever since, he’s been a part of various projects related to coral reefs, mangroves, seagrasses and dugongs, elasmobranch fisheries and leatherback turtles. At the moment, in addition to being on the outset of his PhD, he is also the Project Coordinator of the Marine Programme as pa...

Chayant Gonsalves is a naturalist, birder, artist and all-round snake enthusiast. After completing his training in wildlife biology and conservation from the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, he has returned to his roots and innate love for urban biodiversity, which he continues to engage with through snake rescues, filmmaking, nature trails and art .  Social media: Instag...

Jobin Varughese is an ecologist with a masters in ecology from Pondicherry University. His initial training as an architect, and later as a landscape architect, now contributes in interesting ways to his work on animal behaviour and movement. With an increasing interest in the natural sciences, and growing experience within the field, Jobin entirely shifted gears towards ecology in 2015, and is no...

Ishaan Patil is an early career scientist who is not sure what to call himself yet: anthropologist, environmental scientist or social scientist? He studied Life Science at St. Xaviers’ College, Autonomous, Mumbai, and then took a year off to intern close to home at the Centre for Wildlife Studies and the Nature Conservation Foundation . Next, he did his Masters in Environmental Anthropology at the...

Mrunal Ghosalkar, a National Geographic certified educator, began her conservation journey with the Nature Conservation Foundation by studying the occupancy of hornbills through interviews in northeast India. She later started a program called 'Janata Waghoba' in rural Maharashtra with Wildlife Conservation Society - India to build awareness about leopards in human-dominated landscapes across vari...

Next full episode will be out tomorrow!

Taniya Gill is a doctoral candidate from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Delhi. She began her journey into understanding animal personalities with the rhesus macaques of Shimla during her M.Phil, which has now led her to study the individual unique behaviours and mannerisms of this species in the forest fringes of Delhi. She is also a talented guitarist, and is responsible for...

Nitya Prakash Mohanty is a herpetologist who has spent the last decade studying frogs and lizards, asking interesting questions about their patterns of invasion and sleep! He began his foray into wildlife with a master’s from the Wildlife Institute of India, wherein he studied spotted deer and frogs in the Andaman Islands. After a PhD and a postdoc in South Africa, Nitya is currently doing more po...