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.
Manas National Park and Tiger Reserve has recorded zero rhino and tiger poaching for three consecutive years, according to Assam’s Chief Minister. Officials attributed the result to intensified anti-poaching operations, increased deployment of forest personnel, modern surveillance technologies, intelligence-led enforcement, and active community participation.
This figure comes from an announcement by the Chief Minister’s office via social media and has not been independently verified.
Sources: Deccan Chronicle, Republic World, Northeast Today · 16–17 June 2026
This post is an aggregated summary. India Wildlife News directs readers to the original sources above and does not independently report or verify the figures cited.
India’s Western Ghats draw thousands of photographers each monsoon season in search of pit vipers, cobras and endemic frogs. A King Cobra trafficking arrest in Kodagu and a peer-reviewed study documenting the disappearance of galaxy frogs from a research site suggest the cost to the animals is real and rising.
Delhi’s first comprehensive Bird Atlas records 471 bird species in the capital — including endangered and threatened birds — placing it second only to Nairobi among world capitals for avian diversity.
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.