It lives nowhere else on earth except a 40 square kilometre raft of floating vegetation in the middle of a lake in Manipur. Its name, in Meitei folklore, comes from the way it runs — turning its head back towards whoever is chasing it, as if to look them in the eye. And depending on which government survey you read, there are either 260 of them left, or 64.
Every year before the monsoon, the Western Ghats glow with synchronous fireflies — and this March, scientists published India’s first-ever firefly checklist: 92 species, more than 60% found nowhere else on Earth.
Thirty-five calves. That’s the number a decade of tracking has produced from a rhino population that did not exist in Assam’s Manas National Park twenty-five years ago — because poachers had wiped it out entirely.
A landmark DNA study traces pangolin trafficking routes to Northeast India. An Assam conservationist wins the National Geographic Wayfinder Award for saving the greater adjutant stork. And the wetlands of Thoothukudi are alive with common coots — a quiet signal of ecological recovery.
A camera trap in Kuno National Park has photographed a caracal — India’s most critically endangered wild cat — for the first time in decades. The sighting is remarkable. What it means for the species is more complicated.
India has no single word for what happens when a community embroiders a peacock onto a shawl, paints a tiger onto a temple wall, or weaves a blackbuck into a carpet — and has been doing so for five centuries.
At its lowest point, fewer than 200 hangul survived on earth. All of them in one national park on the outskirts of Srinagar. The hangul is India’s most endangered deer, the state animal of Jammu and Kashmir, and the only survivor of a subspecies of red deer that once ranged across the length of the western Himalayas. It is, very slowly, coming back.
India’s eastern coastline and its island territories are, in documentary terms, some of the most ecologically significant and most overlooked landscapes in the country.
A male hoolock gibbon has used an artificial canopy bridge over a railway line in Assam — the first documented instance anywhere in the world of a gibbon crossing a railway canopy structure. Meanwhile, 22 days after four cheetah cubs were found dead at Kuno, the post-mortem findings remain unpublished.
Seven Asiatic lions have died in Gujarat’s Gir landscape in ten days. Five tigers and their cubs died in Madhya Pradesh’s Kanha from CDV. India’s big cats are facing disease pressure on two fronts simultaneously — and in both cases, the warnings have been on record for years.