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There is a window of about two hours, late in the afternoon, when one can go up the hill to check a camera trap.

Not earlier, because that is when cattle and goats are on the slope, and the granite boulders – the flattest, most walkable surface for miles – are exactly where they climb. Not later, because by then the villagers are bringing their livestock home and the trail is full. The same is true at first light. So the work happens in the gaps: early morning, or the hour before the herds come down.

If one misses those windows, the card fills. Not with wildlife, with cattle, with goats, with people walking to collect firewood, with whatever crosses the sensor a hundred times in an afternoon. A memory card that should hold three weeks of detections is finished in days.

This is fieldwork outside a protected area in the Santhal Pargana division of Jharkhand, eastern India, carried out by one of the authors of this piece, Kulesh Bhandari. What follows is his account.

I have spent close to 240 field days across 35 granite outcrops here, and put out something in the order of 80 camera-trap deployments, most recently eight units for 23 days. None of it inside a national park, a sanctuary, or a reserve. All of it in a landscape that is farmed, grazed, walked through and lived in, every day, by the people whose ground it is.

That is not an unusual place for Indian wildlife to be. India’s protected area network – national parks, wildlife sanctuaries, conservation and community reserves, marine protected areas – covers about 5% of the country’s geographical area. Everything else lives somewhere in the other ninety-five. Roughly 80% of the Asian elephant’s range in India falls outside the protected area network, and elephants are the species we track most closely. For a jackal or a striped hyena (Hyaena hyaena), nobody has run the equivalent number.

It is important to understand what that does to the standard methods, because the answer is not that they get harder. It is that they stop returning usable information, and the landscape then reads as empty in the national record.

What it takes to service a camera

Reaching a survey landscape here can mean 120 to 150 kilometres of travel. The motorcycle has to be left at the nearest village – leaving it at the roadside near forest invites theft – and from there it is five to eight kilometres on foot before the survey area even begins. A day of walking a set of units runs to twelve or eighteen kilometres, much of it on steep granite.

Placement is not free either. The positions that would give the best detections – high on the outcrop, on the open rock, along the obvious movement lines – are the positions most likely to be found. Cattle climb the boulders. Firewood collection runs through the same trails an animal uses.

When mushrooms are fruiting, or when people are out collecting wild onion, the traffic through the forest multiplies. So the units go where they are less likely to be disturbed, which is not where they are most likely to detect.

Everything about the design bends around that constraint: how long a unit can stay out, how far from a village it can go, how much of the landscape can be sampled at once. A protocol written for a protected area assumes none of this. It assumes you place the camera where the animal is.

Tracks that cannot be read

The alternative is sign. In principle this landscape should be good for it: nullahs, river corridors, the sandy margins of fields, the crossings between one patch of forest and the next. In practice it is where every dog, goat and sheep........

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