On the night of 14 January 2017, Makar Sankranti had drawn to a close in the villages near Pakhi Pahar, a forested hill range in West Bengal’s Purulia district. The sky was clear, the moon almost full, and the winter air carried a sharp edge. Joydeep Chakraborty sat beneath a kusum tree (Schleichera oleosa), waiting for a friend who had gone to buy snacks from a nearby shop. When the cold began to settle into his bones around 9.45 pm, he lit a small bonfire beside their camp and held his hands out to the warmth.

The forest had fallen into that familiar night-time rhythm of rustling leaves and distant insects when a sudden sound cut through it. A sharp, cackling howl rose from somewhere in the dark. Joydeep froze. The sound came again, shifting in pitch, neither a dog nor a jackal. He stood up, switched on his torch, and followed the direction of the call towards a dense patch of bushes.

For a brief moment, he sensed movement beyond the light’s reach. The animal called twice more and then slipped away. When he searched the ground, he found no footprints.

“That was the first time I heard a striped hyena in the wild,” Joydeep recalls. “I was scared. But that sound stayed with me.”

At the time, he returned to his camp with more questions than answers. He had been visiting Pakhi Pahar for years as a mountaineer. The hills were familiar terrain. Yet that night marked the beginning of a different relationship with the forest, one that would unfold slowly over the next decade.

A question that would not leave

In the days that followed, curiosity pushed him to look for information on striped hyenas in India. He expected to find detailed studies and field reports. Instead, he found very little, particularly from eastern India. What he did discover concerned their legal status. “Earlier in India, hyenas were listed under Schedule III,” he explains. “After the Wildlife (Protection) Act was amended in 2024, they were moved to Schedule I, alongside species like tigers, elephants, pangolins and vultures.”

The shift reflected concern. Globally, the striped hyena population is estimated at fewer than 10,000 mature individuals. Despite their wide range across parts of Asia and Africa, they face habitat loss, fragmentation, and human conflict. “This animal plays a very important role,” Joydeep says. “It clears carcasses from dumping sites and helps reduce the spread of disease.”

The more he read, the more he realised how little attention the species received in his own region. That gap stayed with him. Soon after that winter night, work took him to South India. Yet even........

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