When India conducted its most recent tiger population estimation, it earned a place in the Guinness World Records as the largest wildlife survey ever undertaken. The scale of the effort was staggering. Thousands of forest department staff and researchers walked more than 6 lakh kilometres, deployed over 32,000 camera traps, and surveyed an area larger than the total landmass of Germany. It was a triumph of logistics, political will, and scientific coordination, and it rightly made headlines across the world. Almost simultaneously, far from the media glare and without fanfare, a much smaller but no less historic exercise was unfolding...