Wild India
India’s geographical location, with its diverse climatic conditions, has endowed it with a natural wealth of astounding variety. With extra ordinary diversity of habitats ranging from snow-laden Himalayan heights to high-canopied tropical rainforests, moist evergreen foothills searing hot desert to mangrove forests and coral reefs, mangrove swamps, India has it all.
Some 500 species of mammals, 2000 species of birds, 450 species of reptiles and 200 species of amphibians and in addition well over 25,000 species of insects and other invertebrates inhabit 16 different types of forests in about 500 protected areas (wildlife sanctuaries and national parks).
To the enthusiastic traveler, India’s rich varied and fascinating wildlife has a great deal to offer. Grand spectacles – 6,00,000 olive ridley sea-turtles on the greatest sea turtle nesting beach in the world in Orissa – or little known animals such as the secretive and endemic lion tailed macaque in the rainforests of southern Western Ghats, or other species of animals found nowhere else in the world, among them the Nilgiri tahr (an endangered mountain goat), the blackbuck, chuasingha and nilgai (three antelopes) and almost unknown forest cane turtle. India also has more species of deer and of cats than any other country in the world and boasts of as many as five large cats: the tiger, lion, leopard, snow-leopard, clouded leopard, and till few decades ago, even the fleet-footed cheetah! Of course, you also have all time favorites like the Indian elephant, the Indian rhino and peacock.
India also offers the best hope of survival for some of the world’s potentially most endangered species – the Asiatic lion, the Bengal tiger, the Asian elephant and the great one-horned rhinoceros.