Nearly every form of the goddess worshipped through Navratri comes with an animal, from lions and a tiger to a bull and a donkey, and several of those animals still live in India’s forests, wetlands and deserts.
West Bengal
Ganges river dolphins in a tidal West Bengal river are detected at noticeably different rates depending on the hour and the height of the tide, and researchers say that should change how the species is counted.
Seed companies that profit from India’s crop varieties have paid ₹2.02 crore towards protecting the biodiversity those varieties came from, and the money is now reaching state-level bodies that can spend it on conservation in local communities.
The Wildlife Conservation Trust has retold how two British artists sketched a wild male rhinoceros at Kotdwar on 20 April 1789, evidence that the Great Indian Rhinoceros once lived in what is now Uttarakhand.
Twenty-four people, from Forest Department staff and local fishers to the Teesta Barrage gateman, received Gaja Mitra Awards in Siliguri on 7 October for helping rescue an elephant calf swept away by the Teesta River.
A three-year-old tigress from Bihar’s Valmiki Tiger Reserve is due to be released into West Bengal’s Buxa Tiger Reserve on Friday morning, in what is the state’s first tiger reintroduction and an attempt to rebuild a population in a forest that currently has no tigers.
A mother elephant and her two calves were found dead in a paddy field in Salboni, West Bengal, on Sunday morning, electrocuted by a wire farmers had strung around their fields in one of the state’s most important elephant habitats.
Odisha’s police Special Task Force and the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau have opened a joint investigation into how five orphaned orangutans ended up abandoned in a forest near Balasore, after CCTV cameras picked up a black SUV near the rescue site the night before villagers found them.
Wildlife Trust of India has switched on a WhatsApp-based elephant alert network in a Uttarakhand village. In West Bengal, the state’s forest minister attended a meeting on securing elephant corridors through the region’s tea gardens.
Five Indian states now have their own paper trail of where elephants and people collide most often, and why.