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50 free Indian Wildlife trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 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 50 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 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which cattle painkiller, banned in India in 2006, wiped out the country's Gyps vultures?
Diclofenac
Diclofenac given to cattle caused kidney failure in vultures that fed on the carcasses, and the white-rumped vulture fell 99.7% between 1993 and 2002. Parsi sky burials in Mumbai faltered as bodies took six months to disappear.
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 the Bishnoi community of Rajasthan, who care for them as sacred, and the antelope can sprint at 80 km/h.
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 they are the last refuge of the sangai, the brow-antlered deer that is Manipur's state animal.
Q 06Which park within Mumbai's municipal limits is famed for leopards living beside millions of people?
Sanjay Gandhi
Sanjay Gandhi National Park is among India's most visited protected areas and holds the 2,400-year-old Kanheri Caves cut by Buddhist monks. Researchers now frame its leopards as a case of coexistence rather than 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 state burned a stockpile of 2,479 poached rhino horns at Bokakhat on World Rhino Day 2021?
Assam
Assam holds most of the world's one-horned rhinoceroses, and the horns were given a 21-gun salute before burning so that keeping them would not lend support to the myth of their medicinal value.
Q 09Which Indian crocodile balances sticks on its head to lure birds hunting for nesting material?
Mugger
The mugger takes its name from magar, the Hindi word for crocodile, and the broad-snouted species has been called the marsh crocodile since the late 1930s.
Q 10Which Rajasthan reserve near Alwar was declared empty of tigers in 2005 after poachers wiped them out?
Sariska
Sariska was restocked from June 2008 by the first aerial translocation of a tiger, a male flown in by helicopter, followed by a second tiger that July and a tigress in February 2009.
Q 11Which 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 it shares its symbolic role with the Indus dolphin, Pakistan's national aquatic animal.
Q 12Which 1972 law largely outlawed hunting in India and gives Schedule I species absolute cover?
Wild Life (Protection) Act
The Wild Life (Protection) Act was enacted on 9 September 1972 and extends to the whole of India; Schedule I and part II of Schedule II give their species absolute protection.
Q 13Which Himalayan animal has been Sikkim's state animal since the early 1990s?
Q 21Which 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 old brown bear' Baloo is usually read as a sloth bear, the only bear living in the Seoni forests where The Jungle Book is set.
Q 22Which 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 23Which 1944 Jim Corbett book, filmed by Universal in 1948, had half a million copies in print by 1946?
Red panda
The red panda's false thumb is an extension of a wrist bone, the radial sesamoid, and in India the animal is found only in Sikkim, West Bengal and Arunachal Pradesh.
Q 14Which bird, the tallest that can fly at up to 1.8 metres, became Uttar Pradesh's state bird in 2013?
Sarus crane
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 15Which 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 16Which 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 17Which Rajasthan bird park, a duck-shooting reserve from 1899, was World Heritage-listed in 1985?
Keoladeo
Keoladeo became the Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary in 1956 and was inscribed under UNESCO's biodiversity criterion, numbered (iv) in 1985 and (x) today; its last Siberian cranes arrived in the winter of 2001–02.
Q 18Which small bird is the state bird of both Delhi and Bihar?
House sparrow
Delhi adopted the house sparrow in August 2012 as its numbers in the capital collapsed, while Gujarat picked the greater flamingo and Puducherry and Jharkhand both chose the Asian koel.
Q 19Which ape, the only one native to India, lives in the forests of the seven northeastern states?
Hoolock gibbon
Hoolock gibbons sing to locate family members and warn off rivals, and the Hollongapar sanctuary near Jorhat held 125 of them in 2023, with one group stranded by a railway line that splits the forest.
Q 20Which 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.
Man-Eaters of Kumaon
Man-Eaters of Kumaon recounts Corbett's hunts of man-eating tigers and leopards from the 1900s to the 1930s, and by May 1946 it had been translated into four Western languages and six Indian ones.
Q 24Which Seoni-district reserve in Madhya Pradesh is among the places said to have inspired The Jungle Book?
Pench
Pench has formed the core of a tiger reserve since 1992 and covers 292.85 square kilometres, one of many forests that may have given Kipling his Mowgli setting.
Q 25Which Ladakh park, the largest in India, has the highest snow leopard density of any protected area?
Hemis
Hemis sits 50 km from Leh at 3,000 to 6,000 metres and holds the 400-year-old Hemis Monastery, a Tibetan Buddhist pilgrimage site; a 2024 survey estimated 477 snow leopards (range 380–598) across Ladakh.
Q 26Which marine mammal is the state animal of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands?
Dugong
The dugong is the only marine mammal chosen as an Indian state or territory symbol, while Lakshadweep picked the butterfly fish.
Q 27Which antelope, the largest in Asia, is the state animal of Delhi?
Nilgai
The nilgai's name fuses the Hindi nil (blue) and gai (cow), and Bihar had it declared vermin so farmers could shoot the crop-raiding herds.
Q 28Which 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 29Under 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 30Which 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.