If you want to hear more tweeps in your neck of the woods, you should learn to let certain things be, things that you would normally want uprooted.

Along Indane Godown Road, which runs parallel to a bund of the Buckingham Canal, in Sholinganallur, dried-up plants — some of these thistles — never cease to entertain me with chirps.

There is something about them that draws birds, and on many an occasion, I have seen either an ashy prinia or a plain prinia sliding up and down the brown twigs, with their characteristic nervous energy.

Here, I am not suggesting that these dried-up plants be allowed to occupy space. Just that, you shouldn’t have them removed unless you have a plan to plant something green, full of sap and life, in its place.

Till you find something better for that space, let them serve as swings and short perches for these birds.

Bulrushes (also known as cattails) with their cylindrical spikes seem to have been made just for the prinias. They love to flit from leaf to leaf, and park themselves on the spikes. Here is a place they will find insects to peck on.

The point is: Biodiversity doesn’t always fit neatly into alluring landscapes. We promote its cause by sometimes letting Nature be, even if we don’t particularly like the look of it.

Sometime ago, during a clean-up exercise involving the Buckingham Canal, which was quite welcome, turnera subulata plants on the bunds got removed, and with them a horde of tawny coster butterflies went “homeless”, and that included the larvae of the butterfly species. It’s a host plant for the species.

Similarly, when Ricinus communis plants were removed as part of a justified clean-up along the Perumbakkam section of the road linking Medavakkam and Sholinganallur, the common castor butterflies wouldn’t be found in as many numbers as before. Wild-growing plants may sometimes have to be cleared, especially when they are weedy and invasive, but let us also bear in mind that what is useless and unpleasant to us, may be a home or a hangout to birds and insects.

Field Notes is a weekly column on the birds of Chennai