IWN Daily Digest — Saturday, 19 September 2026
A second villager injured in an August jackal attack in Jharkhand‘s Bokaro district has died, 36 days after the bite and despite receiving anti-rabies vaccination, leaving ten other injured villagers demanding a fresh medical review before anyone else falls ill.
As reported by Mithila Varnan and Prabhat Khabar (translated from Hindi):
“On August 12, jackals attacked and injured 12 villagers in Nawadih, Bagda, Tangtona, Purni Bagiyari, Raghunathpur and Lalmatia. Radha Mahto, 75, a resident of Teliyadih in Tangtona panchayat who was injured in that attack, died on Thursday. Prior to this, on September 3, Budhni Devi, 33, of Lalmatia in Durgapur panchayat, also died during treatment.”
Mahto was treated at the Community Health Centre in Kasmar and then Sadar Hospital, Bokaro, where she received an anti-rabies vaccine, and went home to recover normally. Thirty-six days after the bite, on Thursday morning, her condition suddenly worsened, and doctors referred her onward to the Rajendra Institute of Medical Sciences in Ranchi. She died on the way, before reaching the hospital.
Family members said both women had begun making jackal-like sounds in their final hours — symptoms consistent with rabies, though no doctor has been quoted confirming the diagnosis. Villagers across the six affected panchayats are now asking Bokaro’s district administration to send a special medical team to re-examine everyone hurt in the attack, and have separately called on the forest department to act against the animal responsible.
High Ground
A new study spanning 26,000 square kilometres of Himachal Pradesh has found that barely one in eight of the state’s richest bird habitats sit inside a protected area, at a time when conservation attention in the high Himalaya remains fixed almost entirely on the snow leopard.
As reported by Mongabay India:
“In the high-altitude landscapes of Himachal Pradesh, conservation efforts have long revolved around the charismatic snow leopard (Panthera uncia). But a new study suggests this focus may be leaving a host of other ecologically vital species outside the conservation umbrella.”
The study, led by Nature Conservation Foundation scientists and partner institutions, mapped where Galliformes — the ground-dwelling family that includes pheasants, partridges and snowcocks — actually live across the Trans-Himalaya and its edges. Only 12.5% of the areas with the highest Galliformes richness, and just 8.8% of those with concentrated endemic species, fall inside existing protected areas.
Researchers leaned on a camera-trap network first built to count snow leopards. “We deployed close to 300 camera traps to estimate snow leopard populations,” said senior author Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi of the Nature Conservation Foundation. “Some pheasants are forest specialists, while others are specialists of the Trans-Himalaya.” Of the 284 traps spread across ten sites between 2016 and 2019, six Galliformes species turned up on camera — the Himalayan monal, chukar partridge, Himalayan snowcock, koklass pheasant, cheer pheasant and snow partridge — though only three had enough sightings for the team to model their distribution.
The habitats in question straddle Hangrang, Tabo, Bharmour and Kullu, where the Greater Himalaya gives way to the drier Trans-Himalaya. Rahul Kaul, who chairs the IUCN Species Survival Commission’s Galliformes Specialist Group for South Asia, flagged a seasonal risk: “Forest fires usually occur during summer, around April, which coincides with the nesting season.”
Mandar Jadhav, formerly Deputy Conservator of Forests for the Spiti Forest Division, argued for bringing villages into the monitoring effort: “The participatory approach gives local communities a sense of attachment and belonging.”
New Arrivals
An India-born cheetah named KGP12 gave birth to four cubs at Kuno National Park in Sheopur district, Madhya Pradesh, on Friday, pushing India’s cheetah count to 56 a day after the reintroduction programme that brought the species back from local extinction turned four.
As reported by The Tribune:
“An India-born female cheetah has given birth to four cubs in the Kuno National Park (KNP) in Madhya Pradesh, Union Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav said on Friday, a day after the cheetah reintroduction programme completed four years.”
KGP12 is the daughter of Gamini, one of the South African cheetahs brought to Kuno at the start of the programme. This is her second litter — her first, also four cubs, was born in April, and none survived, with a leopard the suspected cause.
Union Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav called the birth “a beautiful symbol of hope, resilience and the growing success of cheetah conservation in India.” Kuno field director Uttam Kumar Sharma gave the tally: “With this, India’s cheetah population rises to 56, including 36 Indian-born cheetahs.”
Cheetahs were declared extinct in India in 1952. Prime Minister Narendra Modi released the first eight, flown in from Namibia, into enclosures at Kuno on 17 September 2022 — the programme’s anniversary fell the day before KGP12’s cubs arrived.
Sources: Prabhat Khabar · Mongabay India · The Tribune
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