Indian Wildlife Trivia
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49 free Indian Wildlife trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
India holds most of the world's wild tigers, the last Asian lions, the bulk of its one-horned rhinos and the biggest wild elephant herds outside Africa, all packed into a country of 1.4 billion people. Its reserves carry stories to match: a park that floats on a lake, big cats living beside a megacity, a painkiller that emptied the skies of vultures, and a hill fort at the centre of tiger country. These 49 questions move from the famous reserves and the national symbols to the state animals and birds, the laws and pioneers behind Indian conservation, the Himalaya and the Western Ghats, the rivers and the coast, and a handful of rediscoveries and legends that reward anyone who reads past the headlines. It suits a school quiz, a safari-lodge evening or a pub round for anyone who has watched a tiger documentary and wants the rest of the story: play on your phone with instant explanations, or print it and read it aloud. Every answer is cited to a reference page.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which cattle painkiller, banned in India in 2006, all but wiped out the country's Gyps vultures?
Diclofenac
Diclofenac given to cattle caused kidney failure in vultures that fed on the carcasses, and more than 95% of the birds died off. Parsi sky burials in Mumbai faltered with too few vultures left to consume the dead.
Q 02Whose 1515 woodcut of an Indian rhinoceros sent from Gujarat to Lisbon was drawn without seeing it?
Albrecht Dürer
Albrecht Dürer worked from a written description and a brief sketch, the first rhinoceros in Europe since Roman times having reached Lisbon in May 1515. The real animal drowned in a shipwreck on its way to the Pope.
Q 03Which Madhya Pradesh park received eight cheetahs flown in from Namibia on 17 September 2022?
Kuno
Kuno got five females and three males aged four to six, released by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on his birthday, and twelve more cheetahs arrived from South Africa in February 2023.
Q 04Poaching which animal in 1998 earned Bollywood star Salman Khan a five-year sentence in 2018?
Blackbuck
Blackbuck are revered by Rajasthan's Bishnoi community, and it was Bishnoi villagers who filed the original poaching complaint that put the star on trial.
Q 05Which northeastern park, built on floating phumdi mats, is the world's only floating national park?
Keibul Lamjao
Keibul Lamjao's phumdis are thick mats of decaying vegetation and soil, and the park was created to save the sangai, a brow-antlered deer once thought extinct.
Q 06Which park within Mumbai's municipal limits is famed for leopards living beside millions of people?
Sanjay Gandhi
Sanjay Gandhi National Park draws more than two million visitors a year and holds the Kanheri Caves cut by Buddhist monks. Researchers now frame its leopards as a case of coexistence as much as conflict.
Q 07Which Tamil Nadu reserve is the setting of The Elephant Whisperers, winner of a 2023 Academy Award?
Mudumalai
In Mudumalai, Bomman and Bellie, a Kattunayakan couple, raised the orphaned calf Raghu, and the film became the first Indian winner of Best Documentary Short.
Q 08Which Indian crocodile has been seen balancing sticks on its snout, apparently to lure nest-building birds?
Mugger
The mugger was watched lying log-still in the shallows with twigs across its snout and lunging at birds that waded close, in a 2013 study billed as the first report of tool use by a reptile.
Q 09Which Rajasthan reserve near Alwar was declared empty of tigers in 2005 after poachers wiped them out?
Sariska
Sariska was restocked from 2008, when the first tigers were flown in by helicopter, and the reserve's population had climbed back to about 30 by 2023.
Q 10Which nearly blind river mammal, known locally as the susu, is India's national aquatic animal?
Gangetic dolphin
The Gangetic dolphin hunts murky water by echolocation with tiny lensless eyes, and in the shallows it swims on its side, the first cetacean recorded doing so.
Q 11Which 1972 law sorts India's protected species into schedules and gives Schedule I absolute cover?
Wild Life (Protection) Act
The Wild Life (Protection) Act largely outlawed hunting across India, and it was enacted in September 1972, when the country had only five national parks.
Q 12Which Himalayan animal has been Sikkim's state animal since the early 1990s?
Red panda
The red panda's false thumb is really an enlarged wrist bone, and in India the animal lives mainly in Sikkim, northern West Bengal and Arunachal Pradesh.
Q 13Which bird, the tallest that can fly at up to 1.8 metres, is Uttar Pradesh's state bird?
Sarus crane
Q 21Which ornithologist, the 'Birdman of India', first published The Book of Indian Birds in 1941?
Salim Ali
Salim Ali was the first Indian to run systematic bird surveys across the country, and his influence helped save the Silent Valley rainforest from a dam.
Q 22Which 1944 Jim Corbett bestseller did Universal turn into a 1948 film starring Sabu?
Man-Eaters of Kumaon
Man-Eaters of Kumaon retells Corbett's own hunts of man-eating tigers, yet the film ignored every one of his stories and invented its own plot.
Q 23Which Seoni-district reserve in Madhya Pradesh is among the places said to have inspired The Jungle Book?
Pench
The sarus crane is widely believed to pair for life, though 'divorces' and mate replacement have been recorded, and it is classed as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List.
Q 14Which large forest bird is the state bird of both Kerala and Arunachal Pradesh?
Great hornbill
The great hornbill's female seals herself into a tree hollow with a plaster made mostly of faeces, and the species has lived nearly 50 years in captivity.
Q 15Which Rajasthan tiger reserve surrounds a 10th-century Chauhan hill fort made a UNESCO site in 2013?
Ranthambore
Ranthambore Fort was founded by the Chauhan king Sapaldaksha in the mid-10th century, and its Trinetra Ganesha temple draws thousands of pilgrims every Wednesday.
Q 16Which Rajasthan bird park, a duck-shooting reserve from 1899, was World Heritage-listed in 1985?
Keoladeo
Keoladeo went from a princely duck shoot to the Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary in 1956, and the last of the Siberian cranes that once wintered there arrived in 2001–02.
Q 17Which small bird is the state bird of both Delhi and Bihar?
House sparrow
Delhi adopted the house sparrow in 2012 to promote its conservation as numbers in the capital fell, while Gujarat picked the greater flamingo and Puducherry and Jharkhand both chose the Asian koel.
Q 18Which ape, the only one native to India, lives in the forests of the seven northeastern states?
Hoolock gibbon
Hoolock gibbons call to locate family members and warn off rivals, and the Hoollongapar sanctuary near Jorhat held 125 of them in 2023, with a railway line through the forest threatening the tree-dwelling apes.
Q 19Which Rajasthan state bird, numbering about 150 by 2018, keeps colliding with power lines in the Thar?
Great Indian bustard
The great Indian bustard was a proposed candidate for India's national bird but was dropped in favour of the peafowl, and its numbers fell from about 250 in 2011 to 150 in 2018.
Q 20Which Indian animal carries its cubs on its back and sucks up termites with a noise heard 180 metres away?
Sloth bear
Sloth bear cubs ride their mother until they reach a third of her size, and Kipling's 'sleepy brown bear' Baloo is usually read as a sloth bear, the only bear living in the Seoni forests where The Jungle Book is set.
Pench became the core of a tiger reserve in 1992, and its claim rests on Kipling's wolf pack, which he placed in the 'Seeonee' hills of the district around it.
Q 24Which Ladakh park, the largest in India, has the highest snow leopard density of any protected area?
Hemis
Hemis owes its cats to its prey: bharal, urial and argali graze its valleys, and a national count released in 2024 put 477 of India's 718 snow leopards in Ladakh.
Q 25Which marine mammal is the state animal of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands?
Dugong
The dugong, a seagrass-grazing sea cow, was once numerous around the islands but is now known there from only a few records, while Lakshadweep picked the butterfly fish.
Q 26Which antelope, the largest in Asia, is the state animal of Delhi?
Nilgai
The nilgai's name is usually read as Hindi for 'blue cow', and villagers long linked it with the sacred cow, yet Bihar had the crop-raider declared vermin so it could be culled.
Q 27Which cat, Meghalaya's state animal, is called a 'modern-day sabre-tooth' for its oversized canines?
Clouded leopard
The clouded leopard can climb down tree trunks head first and hang from branches by its hind paws, and in India it ranges across Sikkim, the northeast and northern West Bengal.
Q 28Under which governor's name was India's first national park created in 1936 in today's Uttarakhand?
Hailey
Hailey National Park covered 323.75 sq km when Sir Malcolm Hailey governed the United Provinces, and it became Ramganga National Park in 1954–55 before taking Jim Corbett's name a year later.
Q 29Which deity do Sundarbans honey collectors invoke for protection before entering tiger country?
Bonbibi
Bonbibi is venerated by both Hindu and Muslim residents of the delta, and her arch-enemy Dakshin Rai, the 'Lord of the South', attacks people in the guise of a tiger.
Q 30Which three-state river reserve protects the gharial and the red-crowned roofed turtle?
National Chambal Sanctuary
The National Chambal Sanctuary stretches 5,400 sq km along the Chambal, first declared in Madhya Pradesh in 1978, and its long narrow eco-reserve is co-administered by Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh.