Place · national park · India
Kaziranga National Park
The 1,090-square-kilometre national park on the Brahmaputra floodplain in Golaghat and Nagaon districts, Assam, holding the world's largest population of the one-horned Indian rhinoceros (Rhinoceros unicornis) — about 2,613 rhinos in the 2022 census, two-thirds of the global population. Established as a reserved forest by Mary Curzon in 1904 (she visited and found no rhinos due to poaching), gazetted as a wildlife sanctuary in 1950 and a national park in 1974. UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1985. The park also holds significant populations of tiger, elephant, wild water buffalo and swamp deer. The 2017 Assam floods killed over 300 animals including 25 rhinos; the park's annual monsoon flooding is both a conservation threat and the ecological renewal that maintains the grassland habitat.
- Date
- 1985
- Function
- Archaeology & heritage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 26.580, 93.170
Connections (2)
- In the same set asManas Wildlife Sanctuary
Kaziranga and Manas are both Brahmaputra-valley properties inscribed in 1985 and they diverged completely afterwards. Kaziranga's rhino population grew to two-thirds of the world total; Manas lost its rhinos entirely to the Bodo conflict, went on the danger list in 1992, and was restored by translocating animals from Kaziranga and Pobitora after 2008.
- AnalogueGangteng Monastery & Phobjikha
Two conservation landscapes where the protected animal is also a religious fact. Kaziranga's rhino is guarded by an armed state apparatus and counted in a census that makes national news. Phobjikha's black-necked cranes, three hundred birds wintering from Tibet, are protected because the valley treats their arrival as an omen — the electricity grid was routed underground rather than strung on poles that would kill them. One protection rests on law and rifles, the other on what the valley believes about the birds.
On these journeys
Sources
List of World Heritage Sites in India — Wikipedia
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