Dear Readers,
Conservation is often measured in numbers—tigers counted, rhinos protected, forests restored, corridors mapped. But behind every number is a living story: an animal searching for food, a forest trying to recover, a community learning to coexist, and a landscape struggling to remain connected.
This issue of Wildlife Today brings together stories that remind us of one fundamental truth: wildlife conservation cannot be confined within the boundaries of a protected area.
Our cover story, Project Rhino: India’s Next Big Conservation Mission, examines the country’s renewed commitment to the greater one-horned rhinoceros. From Assam’s Kaziranga to Dudhwa and other rhino landscapes, the future of the species will depend not only on protection, but also on habitat security, scientific management, genetic diversity and connectivity.
Elsewhere, the story of Kawal presents a difficult conservation paradox. The forest has prey and potential, yet resident tigers remain absent. Fragmented corridors, highways, railways, mines and human settlements remind us that a reserve cannot survive as an isolated green island.
We also travel with two elephants across nearly 250 kilometres from Bandhavgarh to Prayagraj—a journey that may reveal an old or emerging corridor hidden within today’s fragmented landscape.
Our stories on the Himalayan black bear and Pilibhit’s canals explore another uncomfortable reality: human infrastructure and wildlife increasingly occupy the same spaces. The answer cannot simply be to choose one over the other. It must be to design landscapes where both can survive.
And then there are vultures—the silent sanitation workers whose disappearance is a warning about ecological imbalance. Their story reminds us that even species often overlooked can hold an irreplaceable place in nature’s machinery.
From rhinos to tigers, elephants to vultures, every story in this issue leads us back to the same question: What kind of landscape are we leaving behind?
Development will continue. Roads will be built. Cities will expand. But progress should not be measured only by what we construct.
It should also be measured by what we refuse to destroy.
Happy Reading!
Sudhir J. Kumar
Founder & Editor, Wildlife Today
