The Madras Christian College campus at Tambaram holds one of the last two large patches of the scrub jungle that once covered much of the Chennai plain. The other is the Guindy National Park and IIT Madras block. The college says its campus includes more than 300 acres of scrub jungle, which students have protected for decades through a society of their own, the Scrub Society.
It is also one of the best-documented wild patches in the city. Birdwatchers have kept records there since the 1930s. Here is what is known about the forest, who has studied it, and what it means for Tambaram.
How a college came to own a forest
The college traces its origins to a school founded in George Town on 3 April 1837 and took the name Madras Christian College in 1877. By the 1930s George Town was too crowded. On 30 January 1937, in what the college calls the “Great Migration”, it moved to Tambaram, according to its history page. The same page describes the new site as a 400-acre stretch of the Selaiyur forest. A department brochure gives the campus as 320 acres “with a scrub jungle”. The figures differ, but every college source agrees that most of the land was left wooded.
The vegetation is a remnant of what botanists call tropical dry evergreen forest. It is a low, thorny, tangled forest that once ran along the Coromandel Coast. A Madras Musings article on Chennai’s wildlife calls the MCC patch richer than the Guindy-IIT pocket. It credits a broad, dense corridor running south towards the Vandalur reserve forest.
What lives there
The same article lists the animals naturalists have recorded on and around the campus:
- 18 species of snakes;
- star tortoises, pangolins, slender lorises, palm civets and hedgehogs;
- bonnet macaques and jackals;
- occasional visits from hyenas, leopard cats and even leopards;
- spotted deer, present since 1982, and peafowl, present since 2005.
Some of these records are decades old, and the corridor to Vandalur has narrowed since. Large mammals such as leopards should be treated as historical records, not something a visitor should expect.
Eighty years of bird records
The campus’s long bird list is largely the work of Gift Siromoney, a statistician and naturalist who taught at MCC. Tribute pages hosted by the Chennai Mathematical Institute trace the record:
| Year | Record | Figure |
|---|---|---|
| 1939 | Bird checklist for the campus by the Barnes | 83 species |
| 1971 | Siromoney’s checklist for Tambaram | 149 species |
| 1978 | Siromoney’s butterfly checklist | Standard reference |
| Today | Butterflies documented in the Tambaram area | About 80 species |
His notes in the Newsletter for Birdwatchers describe a campus that winter migrants passed through. In a 1963 note he recorded a peregrine falcon in the scrub jungle in December 1960, and a red-winged crested cuckoo and a rosy pastor in 1962. A 1966 piece counted at least seven pairs of blue-throated flycatchers wintering on campus. It also reported the first campus record of the white-backed munia, in November 1965, and the first Tambaram record of the Indian banded bay cuckoo.
Those notes are now a baseline. Later campus bird studies around Chennai cite Siromoney’s lists when they compare what has been lost or gained.
The Scrub Society
The forest’s present-day guardians are students. The college says a small group calling themselves the “Green Freaks” began the work, and later formed the Scrub Society with about 20 members. The society is now part of the college’s extension activities: a student can earn a credit through it, as an alternative to the NSS or NCC.
Its regular work includes campus walks, bird watching, a tree census, tree planting and cleaning drives. The college history also credits the society with a lake rejuvenation project on campus, rededicated on 26 July 2024. The department of zoology uses the scrub jungle for its field surveys.
Public access
The campus is a working college with residential halls, not a public park, and the official pages do not describe any public access to the scrub jungle. If you are a researcher or part of a nature group, write to the college first. Its listed contact numbers are 044-22390675 and 044-22396772.
For a similar habitat open to the public, the Forest Department runs the Guindy National Park in the city. Residents of Selaiyur, East Tambaram and Camp Road can still help from outside the walls by keeping dogs leashed near the campus edge and reporting any dumping on the boundary roads.
Quick answers
How big is the MCC campus?
College sources give between 320 and 400 acres. The Scrub Society says more than 300 acres of it is scrub jungle.
When did MCC move to Tambaram?
On 30 January 1937, the college’s centenary year.
How many bird species have been recorded?
A 1971 checklist by Gift Siromoney recorded 149 species for Tambaram, up from 83 on the campus in 1939.
Information checked against official sources on 18 October 2026. Fees, dates and rules can change; confirm on the linked official pages before acting.
Sources
- History and Milestones (Madras Christian College)
- Scrub Society (Madras Christian College)
- Department of Zoology brochure (Madras Christian College)
- Gift Siromoney: Nature study tribute pages (Chennai Mathematical Institute)
- Some uncommon bird visitors observed in and around Tambaram, 1963 (Gift Siromoney, hosted by CMI)
- Birds of the MCC campus, 1966 (Gift Siromoney, hosted by CMI)
- Chennai wildlife (Madras Musings)
