It lives nowhere else on earth except a 40 square kilometre raft of floating vegetation in the middle of a lake in Manipur. Its name, in Meitei folklore, comes from the way it runs — turning its head back towards whoever is chasing it, as if to look them in the eye. And depending on which government survey you read, there are either 260 of them left, or 64.
IUCN
Thirty-five calves. That’s the number a decade of tracking has produced from a rhino population that did not exist in Assam’s Manas National Park twenty-five years ago — because poachers had wiped it out entirely.
The sambar is India’s largest deer, the tiger’s most important prey across much of its range, and one of the least-watched large mammals in the Indian forest. Its invisibility is almost entirely intentional.
When People and Wildlife Share a Border: IUCN Publishes Global Guidelines on Human-Wildlife Conflict
A global framework for navigating the oldest tension in conservation — and India, where elephants killed 629 people last year, may need it more than anywhere.