WILDLIFE IN A CITY POND

“Wetlands in any city are seen mostly as wasteland, waiting to be built over. It takes a tireless environmentalist to show us what city ponds really are – magically rich ecosystems worth preserving. Based on a real-life experience, here is a story that introduces us to the delightful fauna and flora in the urban landscape.”

‘Wildlife in a City Pond’ is one of my first ever Children’s book illustration projects.

This storybook has been published by Pratham books in 5 regional languages – Kannada, Hindi, Marathi, Telugu and Urdu. The illustrations for this book falls under the Creative Commons license (CC-BY-SA 4.0).

With the mission, ‘A book in every child’s hand’, Pratham books have been creating engaging storybooks in multiple languages and formats to help children discover the joy of reading.

This storybook that was published in 2014, went into two print runs and is out of stock now. However, one can enjoy the book on the digital platform – Storyweaver.

The author, Ashish Kothari, beautifully narrates his move into a new home in Pune; his observations of a little pond that his balcony overlooked and the exciting transformation the monsoons brought in, along with the incredible variety of birdlife, insects, amphibians, mammals and reptiles that began to inhabit the little ecosystem. He continues to talk about how the lake was suddenly threatened by urban development, and how people from the neighbourhood came together to save that mini-wilderness.

Some of the storybook illustrations are displayed below. Click on each of them to enlarge.