Less than 100,000 winged visitors have arrived so far in Harike wetlands in the northern Indian state of […]
The trained elephants will assist in patrol operations in and around Corbett Tiger Reserve
Two `man-eater’ leopards that were captured last year and released back in the wild about 3 weeks ago are suspected to be behind attacks on humans in and around Sariska in the northern Indian state of Rajasthan.
The leopards were released after being surgically castrated in the zoo to make them less aggressive, according to the Indian Express newspaper.
At least four villagers have died in leopard attacks since their release.
Amur falcons, small birds of prey of the falcon family, have been spotted stopping by in Kerala’s Malampuzha […]
India’s method of estimating tiger population could be adopted by five Southeast Asian nations, if a proposal of the Global Tiger Forum (GTF) goes through, according to a report by The Hindustan Times.
Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia and Myanmar are the five countries identified by GTF for replicating India’s methodology, which will introduced during a workshop in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in November. Malaysia and Indonesia are incidentally referred to as Tiger economies, a nickname they derived after witnessing an investment boom between late 1980s and mid-1990s.
The GTF, formed in 1994, is the world’s only intergovernmental organisation dedicated to tiger conservation, the Hindustan Times reports. The GTF membership includes seven tiger range countries: Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Cambodia, Myanmar, Nepal and Vietnam.
A failure to conduct a thorough probe of different strains of Herpes virus in elephants may rob Kerala’s forests of all baby elephants, warns a state forest department veterinarian.
The herpes virus that killed 26 elephants over the past 10 years, mostly young ones, both in the wild and captive, had different strains depending on the region they were in like Munnar, Wayanad and Nilambur, the Times of India reports.
In a paper titled `Impact of diseases in wildlife conservation’ at the sixth international conference on NextGen Genomics, Biology , Bioinformatics and Technologies (NGBT) in Kochi, veterinarian Arun Zachariah said that this information came when a full DNA sequencing of the virus found in the elephants was done and analysed. “We are now doing a detailed analysis of the genetic profile of the virus,” he added.
He said the animals died within 48 hours of contracting the virus. “We spent several days monitoring the animals in the wild and realized that the virus was oozing out in the trunk leaks of adult elephants which infected the young ones in the herd. We are trying to understand the relation between the three parameters, pathogen (virus), host (elephants) and environment (climate), and what is the causative trigger,” he said.
Forest officials in India’s Uttar Pradesh have confirmed a new nesting and breeding colony of Sarus Cranes in Etawah, around 300 km from Delhi.
More than a dozen nests, containing two chicks each of the Sarus, which is incidentally the state bird, have been sighted by forest department personnel, ornithologists and wildlife activists in the wetlands and paddy fields of Etawah and Mainpuri districts, the Times of India reports.
This has been the first sighting of nesting and breeding of the bird in Etawah and Mainpuri, Times of India reported, citing forest officials.
“The figure of the number of nests may increase. The counting process of nests is still on as the nesting and breeding season of World’s tallest bird is not yet over,” said divisional forest officer Kanhaiya Patel.
