Towards the end of summer in the emerald-green tea estate of Margaret's Hope, the weather cannot make up its mind. One moment, drizzle comes soft and steady through the tall pine trees. Next, mist rolls in and swallows everything as the hills play hide-and-seek with the sky.
A steep tarmac road drops from the main hill cart path through rows of tea bushes. At the bottom, about 11 kilometres north of Kurseong town, a pond sits hidden in the mist. Sedge, a dense waterside plant common to Himalayan wetlands, stands along its edges like a barricade.
In the hill villages of Darjeeling, India, these ponds have long been more than bodies of water.
“Local communities have been protecting this species long before any funding or international recognition,” says Barkha Subba, a Darjeeling conservation biologist. “These wetlands are deeply intertwined with local culture and religious beliefs.”
What they have been protecting is one of India's last remaining breeding grounds for the Himalayan salamander, known locally as gora or pani chepara in Nepali. They are sometimes described as a tiny dragon that swims quietly in mountain ponds. Growing up to 20 centimetres long, they are also called crocodile newts, for the ridges along their dark bodies.
Scientifically known as Tylototriton verrucosus, it is listed as near threatened on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List of Threatened Species, with a declining population trend.
The munshi at the water's edge
Ramesh Rai, 55, moves around the pond in a white cotton T-shirt and rubber gumboots, parting the sedge and scanning the water. He is searching for eggs tucked into submerged vegetation.
Ramesh is the munshi of Margaret's Hope tea estate, head of the workforce that keeps the 160-year-old site running. His grandfather and father worked this land. He was born and grew up here and has known the gora since childhood.
“There is a place called Gorabari not far from here,” he says, pointing at the tea bushes above the pond. “In the past the gora used to be found throughout the garden fields up there. The place was named after them. That is how many there once were.” Gorabari translates as the garden of the salamander.
In 1993, Ramesh noticed the gora losing ground. While planting tea, he saw ponds shrinking, eggs dying and habitat being consumed by human activity and a shifting climate. He began protecting the salamanders without formal conservation training. In 2005, he wrote about the vanishing creature in the first issue of Sahityashri, a Nepali literary journal printed within the estate.
MK Rai, 52, farms land around the estate. “In June, July, August, you would see them on the road,” he says. “We called them baby dragons then. We did not know their value.”
Now tourists arrive with cameras and picnics, often leaving plastic on the bank. The two men have helped build the nursery pond with estate management and join clean-up campaigns run with Subba's organisation, the Federation of Societies for Environmental Protection, or Fosep.
“Saving the salamander,” MK says, “means saving our culture, too.”
Subba grew up in these hills, hearing stories of tigers, forests and mountain spirits from her grandmother. She studied biological sciences, completed a doctorate on high-elevation amphibians and returned to Darjeeling to work on conservation.
In 2014, researcher Kartik Vasudevan of CCMB Hyderabad mapped 38 salamander habitats across Darjeeling. When Subba returned to check them, most were gone or severely degraded. Wetlands had dried up and invasive species had moved in.
A life cycle tied to the monsoon
“Climate change is no longer a myth or a mystery,” she tells The National. “It is a fact we are seeing in everyday life. And the salamander is one of the clearest signs of what is being lost.”
A peer-reviewed study published in Atmosphere in December 2024, analysing Darjeeling's temperature and rainfall records between 1991 and 2023, found that total rainfall has increased while maximum temperatures have also risen significantly. The rains are coming harder and shorter, not steadier.
The salamander's entire life cycle is tied to the monsoon. With the first rain, it emerges from hibernation and returns to the same pond in which it was born; behaviour scientists call this site fidelity. Destroy that wetland and the species has nowhere else to go.
At Margaret's Hope, 1,500 metres above sea level, salamanders mate and lay 60 to 90 eggs in submerged vegetation. But if the rain stops after two days, the shallow pool dries quickly and the clutch desiccates before hatching.
“They lay eggs thinking there will be rain for another month,” Subba says. “Then suddenly the rain stops, the sun comes out, the pool dries up. The whole generation dies off.”
The threat to the species doesn't stop there.
Carp and guppies, which have been released into the main pond by local religious communities, eat eggs and larvae. Invasive phragmites grass has choked the banks. But, above all, it is climate change.
In a bid to help the species, Ramesh, with members of the community and estate management, built a 1.8m-by-3m nursery pond with a vegetated island close to the main pond. Every March and April, he searches for clutches and moves them away from fish, herons and snakes, monitoring them for 12 to 15 days until they hatch. He is not paid for this work.
The scientist who came home
Subba grew up in these hills and has been coming to Margaret's Hope since childhood. However, 2020 was the first time she came as a scientist, specifically to map the district's salamander habitats. What she found when she arrived surprised her. The community had already been doing the work without her. Around 2015, when the pond had nearly dried up and invasive grass had taken over, residents and estate management cleared it by hand. The salamanders returned.
When Subba met Ramesh, she found something harder to teach than biology: decades of watching. “For him,” she says, “the salamanders are like his children.”
Their collaboration now has formal backing. This year Subba received the 2026 Whitley Award, a prestigious British conservation prize, presented by Princess Anne at London's Royal Geographical Society. She was recognised for protecting seven critical breeding sites across Darjeeling. Margaret's Hope is one of them.
Subba plans to extend the work to Nepal and Bhutan, creating a transboundary framework for a species that knows no borders. An estimated 5,000 individuals survive in the wild, with about 80 per cent living outside protected areas on tea garden land and private holdings.
As the mist thickens again, Ramesh moves on, steady and unhurried. What began in 1993 as one man's effort to protect a disappearing species has grown into a wider conservation movement, bringing together local knowledge, community action and scientific expertise. But at the water's edge, his work remains much the same: watching, waiting and protecting what is left.
