Are Chennai’s wetlands suffering from irregular heartbeats?

Out-of-turn showers seem to have reset Perumbakkam wetland’s ecological clock this year

If one wants to know for a certainty that the planet has been “rewired” for the worse, by anthropogenic activities, they only have to watch a set of barometers, one of which are wetlands and their workaday functions and features. The most significant of them all is the ticking of their internal, ecological clock.

Take the Perumbaklkam wetland for instance: It has an unmistakable dry period, at the height of summer, when the soil looks creased like an aged one’s face having been drained of all water. The pattern was noticeably broken this year due to out-of-turn and unexpected showers, and in mid-June now, there is still sogginess left in the soil. Due to the showers around the cusp of April and June, efforts by a colony of black-winged stilts to raise new families were stillborn. These birds are back at it now, incubating their eggs on the same platforms they had to abandon then. Usually when the water is draining out of a wetland, the small pratincoles put in an appearance.

As expressed by some birders through prolonged observations and also by ornithologist V Shantaram, the water flow dynamics having changed in the Pallikaranai Marsh, the sight of dozens of small pratincoles in the draining period is a thing of the past.