About
Systems & Species

Central India holds the densest concentration of tiger habitat left on earth. Kanha, Pench, Bandhavgarh, Satpura, Tadoba and Navegaon sit inside one connected landscape of sal and teak, and the corridors between them are where the animals actually live out their lives. Reserve cores are counted, patrolled and studied. The land in between is where a tigress moves to establish a territory, and it is the land most quietly available for a road, a mine or a canal.

So this is a register of what was actually there, on which morning, in which forest. Tigers and leopards mostly, and the prey, the birds and the trees that decide whether either can stay. Not trophy frames. A record with dates on it.

The rules do not move. No baiting, no call playback, no crowding an animal that wants to cross, no blocking a movement path, no pressuring a driver for a better angle. Where an animal is outside a protected area or otherwise exposed, the location stays vague, because a public sighting map is also a map for people with worse intentions. Sightings go to open datasets where researchers can use them. The photographs stay here.

About

Shashi is a technology programme manager and wildlife photographer based in Delhi. He has spent fifteen years in enterprise systems, most recently on AI accountability, where the difficult question is not what a system can do but who answers when it is wrong. He has spent roughly as long photographing big cats and birds across northern and central India,

He writes about both at Systems and Species, on the principle that a platform and a forest reward the same discipline: turn up regularly, look carefully, and record what is actually there. A system inventory and a species list are the same document in different clothes, and both fall apart once nobody maintains them.

The technology half of this site is not a separate hobby. Field data across Indian conservation sits in spreadsheets nobody can query, and a species record kept badly fails exactly the way a system inventory does. Both are somebody's honest attempt to write down what is present rather than what should be, and both decay the moment nobody maintains them. Documentation is the slowest form of protection, and the one that outlasts everybody involved.