Uttar Pradesh Quiz: National Parks, Wildlife Sanctuaries and Wetlands of UP

Dudhwa, in Lakhimpur Kheri district on the Indo-Nepal border, was declared a national park in 1977 and remains the only national park in Uttar Pradesh; everything else protected in the state is a wildlife sanctuary, a tiger reserve or a conservation reserve.

The park lies in the Terai of Lakhimpur Kheri along the Nepal border, and the Kishanpur sanctuary, which forms part of the same tiger reserve, is in the same district.

The Hastinapur wildlife sanctuary stretches along the Ganga across Meerut, Bijnor, Muzaffarnagar, Amroha, Hapur and Ghaziabad, which makes it the largest sanctuary of the state and one that spans the most districts; it protects the swamp deer of the Ganga plain and includes the Haiderpur wetland, a Ramsar site.

The Girwa flows out of Nepal through Bahraich district, and its clear, deep stretch inside Katarniaghat is one of the few places in India where the gharial and the Gangetic dolphin are found together, which is why the sanctuary is treated as a key gharial breeding site.

Lions brought from the Gir forest of Gujarat were released there in the late 1950s and bred for a few years, but poaching and the small size of the forest wiped the group out, and the experiment is now cited as the first attempt to give the Asiatic lion a…

The sarus is the tallest flying bird in the world, standing about as high as a man, and it nests in the shallow marshes and flooded fields of Mainpuri, Etawah, Etah and Aligarh, which makes Uttar Pradesh its stronghold in India; the pair that stays together for life has made…

The stretch is valued because it still carries the Gangetic dolphin, the gharial, turtles and large numbers of wintering waterbirds in a river that is heavily used elsewhere.

The sanctuary covers a stretch of the Ganga at Varanasi and was created so that turtles released into the river could clean it of organic waste and the species themselves be protected from the trade in shells and meat.

The TX2 award, named for the global goal of doubling wild tiger numbers, was given for the first time in 2020, and the Pilibhit Tiger Reserve in the Terai of Uttar Pradesh received it after its tiger count rose sharply in the years following its notification as a tiger reserve.

It needs tall wet grassland and will not survive in dry forest, so its fate is tied to the Terai, and the herds of Dudhwa and Kishanpur are among the largest anywhere; the Hastinapur sanctuary protects the separate population of the Ganga plain.