Five Indian states now have their own paper trail of where elephants and people collide most often, and why.
karnataka
Three weeks of India wildlife news, distilled: a landmark trafficking bust rescuing 440+ animals, cheetahs getting a third home at Nauradehi, a Great Indian Bustard chick surviving 40 days in Kutch, the Gir lion structural crisis, wild water buffalo returning to Kanha after a century, and early AITE 2026 tiger census results.
A viral video of an elephant scavenging through plastic waste in Karnataka’s MM Hills is not an isolated incident — it’s part of a documented pattern that has already killed at least one elephant this year, and the same habituation behind it carries a slower, less visible risk to people too.
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.
India’s Western Ghats draw thousands of photographers each monsoon season in search of pit vipers, cobras and endemic frogs. A King Cobra trafficking arrest in Kodagu and a peer-reviewed study documenting the disappearance of galaxy frogs from a research site suggest the cost to the animals is real and rising.
India has no single word for what happens when a community embroiders a peacock onto a shawl, paints a tiger onto a temple wall, or weaves a blackbuck into a carpet — and has been doing so for five centuries.
Karnataka has ended open-vehicle wildlife safaris across all its tiger reserves and wildlife sanctuaries. The announcement, made by Forest Minister Eshwar Khandre, is the latest in a series of safety measures following two years of escalating leopard and tiger attacks on visitors and forest-fringe communities.
On International Leopard Day 2026, IWN looks at India’s most misunderstood big cat — 13,874 individuals counted, thousands living outside protected areas, and a country still figuring out how to share space with them.
Forest officials in Karnataka’s Shivamogga seized 45 country-made explosive devices from a habitual poacher on 19 April 2026. Here’s what handi bombs are, how they work, and why they’re one of the most dangerous threats to Indian wildlife.
IWN Original Report — Saturday, 18 April 2026 India’s highways are expanding at a pace its wildlife cannot […]