We hunt the leopard. I can show you how we track them too,” said the Konda Reddi tribal villager. We were at Villarthi village, in a remote forested stretch between the towns of Upper Sileru and Donkarayi in the northern Eastern Ghats of Andhra Pradesh’s
Visakhapatnam district. Acrossthe border lay Odisha. Historically this region supported a rich floral diversity, but in recent decades the Eastern Ghats have largely been ignored in favour of other hill regions across India. The rediscovery of the Indian golden gecko Calodactylodes aureus and the Jeypore ground gecko Geckoella jeyporensis, earlier presumed locally extinct has caused some resurgence of public interest, but not enough to make a significant difference. Several researchers have begun to study the faunal diversity of this incredible region, but the hazards confronting this landscape seem almost insurmountable.