August 2010: The blue waters of the Ramganga shimmered in the afternoon sun. It was an idyllic day, perfect for lying at the river’s edge, looking at the blue sky and the wide sweep of water as a river that had flowed for centuries lapped its white stone-lined banks. But life, as it often does, had other plans for me and I had work to do.

August 2010: Sanctuary Asia presents below an indicative ‘Tiger Agenda’ for the next decade. This has been arrived at in consultation with some of India’s best wildlife experts, including forest officers, state government officials, the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and several members of the National Board for Wildlife.

August 2010: The Central Indian tiger landscape spans from Maharashtra to Madhya Pradesh across several Protected Areas (Kanha – Pench (Madhya Pradesh) – Pench (Maharashtra) – Satpuda – Nagzira – Tadoba-Andhari).

October 2006: The IUCN, the World Conservation Union, an international organisation dedicated to natural resource conservation has various labels for species based on its perception of their status – threatened, vulnerable, endangered, and so on.

“Frogs, so common in these humid forests, are crucial links in the ecology. If they disappear, all kinds of food chains will be broken and the effect could be little short of catastrophic to wildlife in general. And sadly, for now at least, it seems like the golden frog has waved its last in the wild.”

Human actions, whether direct or indirect, are nowadays almost singularly responsible for nudging species towards their doom. Redemption from such a, potentially, lost cause lies in the adroit harnessing of resources, an assessment of the situation, the application of rigorous science, and hopefully, the forestalling of a threatened species careening towards extinction.

Stranded. On the terrace of a Pollution Control Research Centre building on the edge of Rajaji National Park in Uttarakhand. It’s nearing midnight, and we have been here for hours. I am hungry, exhausted and the bones are stiff with the effort of sitting still, silent, as if we weren’t here at all. To fool, well, to try fool, the elephant barely ten feet away from us.

There are certain pursuits which, if not wholly poetic and true, do at least suggest a nobler and finer relation to nature than we know. The keeping of bees, for instance. – Henry David Thoreau

October 2007: Jennifer Scarlott writes about the phenomenon called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) that is causing unprecedented mortality of honeybees in the United States.

January/February 1993: The author, ‘Billy’ Arjan Singh was one of the first to blow the whistle on the sinister motives of the shikar operators who insisted on minting fortunes out of shikar, even when presented with evidence that the great cats were headed towards extinction.

October/December 1982: There are now eleven Tiger Reserves in India. Hopefully, there will soon be more. The killing of tigers and their commercial exploitation is banned, but along with the desire to save the tiger there exists a blind determination to exploit his habitat. The tiger is our national animal and an international status symbol, but we have not been able to muster sufficient political support to prevent the destruction of his homeland.