Every May, India’s forest departments send teams into the field at 8am to count the animals. It is a tradition that has held for decades — early enough to catch movement, before the day’s heat drives wildlife into shade and stillness.
This year, in Chittorgarh, Rajasthan, that tradition broke.
On 1 May 2026, the district forest department began its annual wildlife census not at 8am but at 5pm — shifting the entire count into the evening and overnight hours, running through to 5pm on 2 May. The reason given by Deputy Forest Conservator Mridula Sinha was direct: the daytime heat has made the conventional schedule unworkable. Chittorgarh, one of Rajasthan’s hottest districts this season, has been recording temperatures above 45°C through the day. Even the animals, as IWN noted last week, are responding — retreating to shade, moving less, drinking more. Sending human survey teams into that landscape at 8am and expecting reliable wildlife sightings is no longer realistic.
So the count goes to the night.
What changes after dark
The methodology shifts with the timing. The Chittorgarh census is being conducted using two tools particularly suited to low-light conditions: moonlight-aided visual surveys and camera traps. The bright nights of early May — the lunar calendar cooperating, for once, with the demands of field science — provide enough ambient light for trained observers on foot and in vehicles to spot and record wildlife movement. Camera traps, set across known animal trails, water sources, and forest edges, run continuously and capture what the observers miss.
This is not a degraded version of the census. In some respects it is a better one. Nocturnal surveys catch animals that daylight counts consistently underrepresent: leopards, hyenas, wolves, civets, porcupines, and the full range of small carnivores that are largely invisible to an 8am survey team. The animals that dominate daytime counts — deer, wild boar, the occasional tiger — are also active at night, particularly in the heat of late April and May when they shift their feeding to cooler hours. A count that runs from evening through the night and into the following afternoon potentially captures a more complete picture of the landscape than the conventional window ever did.
What it says about where we are
The more significant story here is not the methodology. It is the reason for it.
India’s wildlife census traditions were built around a climate that no longer reliably exists. The assumption embedded in an 8am start is that May mornings in Rajasthan are manageable — warm, yes, but workable. That assumption is under pressure across much of the country. Chittorgarh’s temperatures this season have exceeded 45°C before noon on multiple days. The Meteorological Centre in Jaipur has recorded the district as Rajasthan’s hottest location through much of April. The heat does not relent after sunset the way it once did — minimum temperatures in several districts have been recorded above 30°C — but evenings and nights remain more viable than the long, scorching middle of the day.
The Chittorgarh forest department’s decision is a small administrative adjustment. But it is also an acknowledgement, written into official procedure, that the conditions India’s conservation institutions were designed for are changing. When the census has to go nocturnal because daytime is too hot, the heatwave has moved from weather event to operational constraint.
IWN reported last week on what India’s 2026 heatwave is doing to the country’s wildlife — birds falling mid-flight in Delhi, water sources drying weeks early, raptor breeding disrupted by phenological mismatch. The Chittorgarh census is a quieter data point in the same story: the field teams counting India’s animals now have to work around the same heat that is stressing the animals themselves.
Sources: City 24×7 News · National Herald India · IWN — When the Forest Burns Without Fire