8 Sep 2019


When Bilal Habib, a scientist with the Wildlife Institute of India (WII), Dehradun, fixed camera traps on the pillars of nine underpasses beneath a stretch of National Highway 44 — India’s longest highway from Srinagar to Kanyakumari — he found, amid hundreds of images of people, cattle and street dogs, a world of wildlife far vaster than he expected.

Two days after the cameras were installed in March this year, a female tiger was photographed strolling through one of these underpasses. Within the next three months, a pack of wild dogs was filmed hunting a spotted deer; then there was a leopard, a gaur, a sloth bear, civet cats, and thousands of langurs. They used the underpasses mostly at night but sometimes also by day; some in garrulous groups, others solitarily; they used them to nap, to play among their pack, to hunt, but most often, just to get to the forest on the other side of the road.

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