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 Meanwhile, 22 days after four cheetah cubs were found dead at Kuno, the post-mortem findings remain unpublished.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.
Northeast India is one of the world’s great biodiversity frontiers. The change in how it has been documented arrived from an unexpected direction.
India has close to 30 species of freshwater turtles and tortoises. Seventeen of them carry Schedule I protection under the Wildlife Protection Act — the same schedule that covers tigers. Most people have never heard of a single one.
DRI officers intercepted two suspects near Pune Railway Station on May 20, recovering three live Malabar giant squirrels and seven Indian star tortoises — both protected under Schedule I of the Wildlife Protection Act.
India has rescheduled the first International Big Cat Alliance Summit, originally set for June 1 in New Delhi, after the India-Africa Forum Summit was deferred amid the Ebola outbreak in Africa.
The nilgai is India’s largest antelope, one of its most widely distributed large mammals, and possibly its most politically contested. In Bihar it is protected by religious sentiment. In Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh it has been declared vermin. The same animal, under the same law, treated in entirely opposite ways depending on where it stands.