Masira Shaikh: The Woman Who Taught a City to Listen to Its Forest

Programme Curator · Internship Coordinator · Senior Member Specialty Birding · Habitat Ecology · Tribal Ecology · Urban NatureYears Active 5–10 years

## The Weekends That Built a Naturalist

Before the forest taught Masira Shaikh everything, the city’s edges did. During her college years in Mumbai, she made herself a quiet rule: every weekend, a new green spot. Not the famous ones. The in-between ones, the scrubby patches between Thane and Navi Mumbai, the seasonally flooded fields behind highway flyovers, the overgrown nullahs that nobody had thought to name.


These spots, she discovered, were hiding things. Aquatic birds that had flown thousands of kilometres to sit in that exact pool of water. A large owl, the Rock Eagle-Owl, perhaps, camouflaged so perfectly against a stone face that you wouldn’t know it was there until it blinked. A small quail, completely oblivious to the parking lot five minutes away, foraging in a bush between two apartment complexes.

The wild, she understood early, was not absent from Mumbai. It was just unwitnessed. And because it went unwitnessed, it went undefended. A few years after she’d visited those forgotten patches, many of them had become construction sites. The spots that no one knew about became, precisely because of that, the spots that no one fought for.

That quiet tragedy has shaped everything Masira has done since.

> “The spots no one knows about become the spots no one fights for. That’s why telling people what’s out there matters.”

## From Birds to Habitats and Why It Mattered

Masira started, as many naturalists do, with birds. Birdwatching gave her a structured way into the complexity of ecosystems, a gateway species, in the truest sense. But over time, as Mumbai’s forest patches continued to shrink and fragment, she found herself pivoting from species identification to something larger: habitat ecology.

She noticed a recurring problem in her field programmes. Participants would arrive with a misunderstanding so fundamental it had to be addressed before anything else could land. A forest, many believed, was just a random collection of trees. A grassland was barren, unproductive land. An estuary was a dirty drain outlet, a naalah where sewage met the sea.

These weren’t fringe views. They were common. And Masira understood that no amount of bird listings or species counts would create conservationists out of people who had never understood what a habitat actually was the base logic of what makes a forest a forest, or a wetland a wetland, and why that logic matters to every single living thing inside it, including us.

So she built that understanding into the architecture of every programme she curated. First the habitat. Then the species. Then the connection between them. Then the participant’s place in that web.

> “Most people think a grassland is barren land. Once you understand it’s one of the most biodiverse ecosystems on Earth, you can’t unsee it.”

## A Decade Inside Aarey

In 2019, Masira began working with the tribal communities living inside Aarey, Mumbai’s largest urban forest, home to over 10,000 adivasis across 27 hamlets, belonging primarily to the Warli, Mahadev Koli, and Malhar Koli tribes who have lived here far longer than the city that now surrounds them.

What she found changed her relationship with nature education permanently. These communities, the true first protectors of Aarey practice a form of sustainable living that most urban sustainability advocates can only theories about. They take from the forest, but calibrate their use precisely to the cycles of regeneration. They follow the seasons to regulate resource consumption. They understand themselves not as visitors to the ecosystem, but as participants in it. Their cultural knowledge, built across generations of observation and adaptation, encodes ecological relationships that no field guide has ever captured.

The Aarey tribal communities have since gained wider recognition their way of life has drawn international attention, including a cultural exchange where the Maori tribe from New Zealand travelled to Aarey specifically to meet them. Maharashtra Tourism recognised the work Masira and NatEx have done in building sustainable tourism experiences within Aarey, bridging these communities with urban visitors in a way that dignifies rather than spectacularises.

A decade in, Masira still walks Aarey regularly with the tribals and still sees new things. New animal encounters, new plant interactions, new aspects of the forest she hadn’t noticed before. That she says, is the truest measure of a forest’s depth.

> “The tribal communities of Aarey don’t just live in the forest. They live according to it. That’s the lesson every city dweller needs to receive.”

## Mumbai’s First Urban Bat Walks

By 2026, Masira had turned her attention to something nobody had seriously attempted in an Indian city before: urban bat watching.

Birdwatching is a global phenomenon a sport, a hobby, a science, a community. Bat watching exists too, but almost entirely in European and American countries, where bat walks through forests and caves have become established public experiences. In India, in a city like Mumbai, the idea barely registered. And given that bats had spent two years absorbing enormous public hostility during the COVID-19 pandemic blamed, misrepresented, and feared in ways that had little to do with ecological reality there was active ground to recover.

Working with bat researcher Rajkumar Patel, Masira spent months exploring the famous and lesser-known cave systems of Mumbai. Across multiple surveys, they identified three separate species of bats and mapped their colonies within the city. Then they opened those experiences to the public evening walks to observe bat emergence, demonstrations of the acoustic detection equipment used to study bat calls, and a patient, evidence-based effort to rebuild public affection for animals that had been badly maligned.

The bat walks were listed on Urbanaut and drew curious participants who had never thought of Mumbai as a place where this kind of encounter was possible. Many of them hadn’t. The newspaper coverage that followed brought the project to audiences well beyond the naturalist community exactly the point.

> “Bats get a lot of unwarranted hate. They’re not as aesthetic as birds, nor do you see them at a preferable time of day. And COVID myths have made them even more disliked. That’s precisely why we did this.”

## The Leopard, the Owlets, and the Fawns

Masira’s most electrifying field encounters have all happened in Aarey. Not in a tiger reserve. Not in a national park hours from the city. Ten minutes from the jam-packed Western Express Highway, in a forest that millions of Mumbaikars pass by every day without a second thought.

She has walked at night with a single headlamp and had a pair of glowing eyes hold her gaze from twenty feet away. Confirmed leopard. She has gone for an evening stroll in December and had five or six Spotted Owlets start following her through the treetops, their alarm calls ringing through the cooling air not sure if they were calling for her or for something larger moving in the dark just ahead. She has stood in the crisp early morning and watched juvenile Grey Hornbills play catch with cotton pods from a Katesavar tree, the white fibres falling like slow snow around them, while a herd of Spotted Deer antlered stags, does, and tiny fawns grazed in a clearing nearby.

These are not exotic postcard images from a distant wildlife destination. These are Mumbai. And the fact that most of the city doesn’t know this is precisely the problem Masira has dedicated the better part of a decade to solving.

## The Art of Curating Nature Experiences

Inside NatEx, Masira is the longest-serving team member — which means her role has expanded, organically and continuously, to fill whatever the organisation needed. Today that means she is simultaneously a Programme Curator who translates a client’s brief into a hands-on outdoor or indoor nature experience; an educator who has mapped her programmes across school syllabi for every age group and board (CBSE, ICSE, SSC, IB, she has all of them memorised); and an Internship Coordinator who interviews, selects, and trains the next generation of NatEx naturalists.

The internship coordination is, in some ways, the most layered role. Masira isn’t just teaching people to identify species. She is building people into confident, skilled, calm field leaders, naturalists who can hold a group’s attention through an empty stretch of forest because their knowledge and presence are enough. It is the work of someone who understands that the nature education movement needs people as much as it needs places.

Her field bag, every single time, carries the same three things: a big water bottle, a head torch, and mosquito repellent not for herself, but for her participants. It’s a small detail, but it says everything about how she approaches her work. She’s not in the forest for herself. She’s there to make sure others can stay long enough to fall in love with it.

> “Wildlife is mostly very resilient and intelligent. They adapt in ways we can hardly predict. Our job is to get people curious enough to pay attention.”

## The Crow’s Logic

Ask Masira for her spirit animal and she doesn’t reach for something majestic. She picks the Common House Crow. Highly intelligent. Perpetually curious. Endlessly adaptable to harsh and chaotic conditions. Found everywhere, because it has learned how to be everywhere. And with great intelligence, she notes, comes notoriety, mischief, and a love of shiny things.

It is, when you think about it, a precise self-portrait. Someone who has been everywhere in this city, its rooftops and its forest edges, its tribal hamlets and its BMC school classrooms. Someone who has learned to operate in the gap between the wild and the urban, and built something meaningful in that uncomfortable, overlooked in-between space.

Mumbai has a wild soul. Masira Shaikh has spent a decade proving it exists, one walk at a time.