Sunjoy Monga, champion of urban birdwatching in India, dies at 63
In a city of relentless noise and concrete, Sunjoy Monga taught Mumbai to look up. The flash of a kingfisher, the silhouette of a kite, the call of a koel at dawn—he urged his fellow citizens to notice these things, not as fleeting curiosities but as reminders that the natural world still lingered among them.
“Birds teach, they are always revealing some secret, they act as a barometer of the city’s general health,” he once said.
For more than four decades, he acted as interpreter between the metropolis and its wild inhabitants, showing that conservation was not confined to remote forests but began at the edge of one’s doorstep.
Born in Masjid Bunder in 1961 or 1962, he grew up amid Mumbai’s dwindling greenery. By six he was birdwatching, and by his teens he was carrying a Nikon camera to record what he observed. His pictures and words would eventually grace books, newspapers, and magazines, nearly 20 volumes in all. Early stints with WWF-India, Sanctuary Asia and the Bombay Natural History Society helped hone his skills as both a naturalist and a communicator. He later served on BNHS’s governing council, on the executive committees of Mumbai’s environmental societies, and as honorary warden of Sanjay Gandhi National Park.
Monga had a knack for building communities. In 2005 he launched the India BirdRaces, inspired by a Hong Kong event. Beginning in Mumbai, they soon spread across dozens of cities. On a single day each year, groups of enthusiasts—schoolchildren, office workers, seasoned ornithologists—scoured their surroundings, tallying species and sharing observations. Long before apps made such exercises routine, his initiative generated valuable data while nurturing an urban birdwatching culture. His Young Rangers program likewise introduced thousands of schoolchildren to the outdoors.
He was also a skilled photographer, earning recognition in the 1991 BBC–British Gas International Photographer of the Year competition and contributing to documentaries such as Channel 4’s Wild India and Sir David Attenborough’s The Trials of Life. His books, from Birds of Mumbai to Journeys Through India’s Last Wild Places, combined striking images with a clear-eyed account of ecological pressures. He could be candid about India’s losses, yet his writing often revealed the possibility of adaptation and renewal.
Diagnosed with blood cancer in 2016, he continued to watch birds from his window, camera at hand, until his death on May 28, 2025, aged 63. He is survived by his wife, Jyoti, and daughter, Yuhina—named, fittingly, after a Himalayan bird. For those who walked with him on nature trails or joined his bird races, the city still feels a little more alive, its skies more worth scanning.
