When Elephants Trample Your Farm, Who Do You Call?

When Krithi Karanth walks into a forest village in the shadow of India’s Bandipur National Park, she is often greeted by farmers with cell phones in hand — ready to report video of a night-time encounter with an elephant herd, or the fresh tracks of a leopard that passed behind their homes.

They are dispatches from the frontlines of some of the world’s most intense wildlife interactions. In the rolling green hills of India’s Western Ghats, survival depends on co-existing with high-density populations of some of the planet’s most imperiled species. That can come at a cost: Wild elephant herds can damage valuable banana plants, and tigers can turn up unexpectedly in sugarcane fields — threatening livestock and sometimes lives.

For farmers like Shankarappa in the region’s Naganapura village