IWN Report — Monday, 29 June 2026

Northern Karnataka’s Bagalkote district is not a name that usually appears in wildlife headlines. No tiger reserve, no national park, no flagship species drawing safaris and camera crews. What it has, spread across 79 Reserved Forests and roughly 409 square kilometres, is something conservation science is only beginning to document properly: a functioning dryland mammalian community, with leopards at the top.

That community is now on record. Holématthi Nature Foundation (HNF), the Bengaluru-based conservation NGO led by leopard biologist Dr Sanjay Gubbi, has published a camera trap survey of the Bagalkote Forest Division and adjoining Reserved Forests, estimating the resident leopard population and documenting the mammalian diversity of a landscape that rarely makes it into formal wildlife assessments.

The survey divided the study area into three clusters, deploying camera traps at 148 locations across the 409 sq km landscape for 16 days. The traps returned 21 mammal species — 17 of them protected under Schedule I of the Wildlife Protection Act, a figure that reflects how much ecological weight these unremarkable-looking drylands actually carry.

Two leopards were identified, one each in two of the three clusters. The more unexpected headline, however, belongs to the striped hyena: the study estimated 10 individuals in one cluster alone, with densities of 1.17 individuals per 100 sq km in one zone and 1.87 in another — numbers that point to Bagalkote as genuinely significant striped hyena habitat. Camera traps collected 840 photographs of hyenas across the study period, against 291 of wolves and 28 of leopards. The hyena, routinely overlooked in Indian conservation, appears to be the apex scavenger holding this landscape together.

Among prey species, the golden jackal had the highest relative abundance across all three clusters. Wild prey — Indian hare, wild pig, and Indian porcupine — were present but outpaced in photographic captures by domestic livestock and dogs. The study flags this directly: carnivore reliance on domestic prey raises the likelihood of human-wildlife conflict in the area, a pressure that the landscape’s lack of formal protection does nothing to buffer.

Two further findings stand out. The study documented what appears to be a wolf-dog hybrid individual — a conservation concern, since genetic introgression from domestic dogs threatens the integrity of wild canid populations and creates disease transmission risks. It also recorded the rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta) in the region for the first time on camera — a range record that adds another dimension to Bagalkote’s wildlife inventory.

HNF’s recommendations from the study include the creation of a Badami Striped Hyena Wildlife Sanctuary, management of the feral dog population, reduced grazing pressure in the Reserved Forests, and greater conservation attention for multi-use landscapes of this kind.

What the cameras found

The study is one of a growing series of HNF surveys targeting Karnataka’s dryland and Deccan Plateau forests — landscapes that fall outside the Western Ghats corridor and, as a result, outside most conservation investment and attention. Bagalkote sits in northern Karnataka, a semi-arid zone of scrub and dry deciduous forest, agriculturally transformed in places, unprotected for the most part, and home to species that have adapted to exactly this kind of pressured, fragmented terrain.

The significance of the findings lies as much in the landscape as in the numbers. Reserved Forests — as distinct from Wildlife Sanctuaries or National Parks — carry lower legal protection and are subject to competing claims from forestry, agriculture, and infrastructure. Documenting a leopard population and a functioning carnivore community in such a landscape is an argument, in data, for why these forests matter and what is at stake if they are fragmented further.

The dryland case

HNF has been making this argument systematically across Karnataka. A parallel survey of the neighbouring Gadag Forest Division — also published on the foundation’s reports page — covers similar terrain. Together, these studies build a picture of dryland Karnataka as a carnivore landscape that is ecologically significant, understudied, and largely invisible to conservation policy.

Dr Sanjay Gubbi, whose doctoral research focused on leopard ecology and distribution across a habitat modification gradient in Karnataka, has long argued that the species’ survival in India depends not just on protecting the Western Ghats and tiger reserve networks, but on understanding and securing the Reserved Forests and unprotected landscapes in between. Bagalkote is precisely that kind of landscape.

The leopard is a Schedule I species under India’s Wildlife Protection Act — carrying the same legal protection as the tiger — and is listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List. Its ability to persist in degraded and fragmented habitat makes it both more resilient than most large carnivores and, paradoxically, more vulnerable to being overlooked: its presence in a forest does not, by itself, make that forest a conservation priority in the eyes of policy.

Studies like the Bagalkote report push back against that invisibility. Not every landscape tells the same story — but every landscape that still holds leopards, hyenas, and wolves is telling one worth reading.

Sources: Holématthi Nature Foundation — Estimation of Leopard Population and Mammalian Diversity in Bagalkote Forest Division (Full Report) · About HNF