Whenever Keerthi Krutha's mother, T V Champakalatha, asked her to come home for festivals, she often received an answer that said everything about her daughter's love for the wilderness.

"Amma, I am already home. The forest is my home," Keerthi would tell her.

For the 36-year-old Chennai-born wildlife researcher, the forests of the Western Ghats had become part of everyday life. After sunset, when frogs began calling from streams and insects filled the air with their sounds, she would set out with a torch, sampling kits and notebooks.

Her task was to find the frogs, collect samples from their skin, record what she saw and release them unharmed.

Some nights meant crossing slippery rocks and swollen streams. Others brought leeches, unpredictable rain and hours of walking. Yet these were the places Keerthi had always wanted to be.

Over several years, working largely on her own, she surveyed 49 protected areas and 19 other landscapes, documenting more than 3,000 amphibians.

She was searching for answers to a worrying question: was a fungus that had devastated frogs in other parts of the world spreading through India's forests too?

Her research would help scientists understand where the fungus had reached in the Western Ghats and how to keep checking for it.

"If frogs are dying, then it means there is a problem," Keerthi told The Hindu in 2015. "Frogs are ecological indicators."

Speaking to The Better India, she traces this work back to a childhood spent learning about snakes, crocodiles and forests.

It began with a childhood love for wildlife

Growing up in Chennai, Keerthi looked forward to nature documentaries and filled her shelves with wildlife books. Family trips often took her to forests rather than popular tourist attractions. The more she learnt, the more time she wanted outdoors.

"It wasn't something that came suddenly," her mother tells The Better India. "Nature was always where she felt happiest."

In 2004, as a school student, Keerthi was selected as a Sanctuary Asia Tiger Ambassador through the Kids for Tigers programme. Visits to protected forests introduced her to people who had made wildlife conservation their life's work. Conservation began to feel like a possible future.

She also volunteered at the Madras Crocodile Bank, helping clean crocodile enclosures after the 2004 tsunami.

While........

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