A camera trap set up to count civets and porcupines on the edge of Shillong instead caught something almost nobody expected to see: a live, wild Chinese pangolin, walking through the leaf litter in the dead of night.

  • 1 Chinese pangolin confirmed — the first-ever record for this Wildlife Institute of India survey area
  • 2 pangolin species found in India: Chinese and Indian
  • Listed Critically Endangered by the IUCN since 2014
  • Survey forests: Riat Laban and Laitkor, both on Shillong's city limits

What the camera caught

The sighting came out of a Wildlife Institute of India (WII) project mapping mammal diversity across Meghalaya, in the country's northeast. Researchers had camera traps running through the Riat Laban and Laitkor reserve forests, patches of woodland that sit right at the edge of Shillong's urban sprawl.

Alongside the usual cast of forest mammals — a large Indian civet, a leopard cat, a yellow-throated marten — one frame showed something researchers had never recorded there before: a Chinese pangolin (Manis pentadactyla), its body armored in overlapping keratin scales, ambling past at night.

It is one of only two pangolin species native to India. The Chinese pangolin is the smaller of the two, distinguished from the Indian pangolin by scale size and the absence of a bare terminal patch on its tail. In India its range runs through the northeastern states and northern West Bengal, with Arunachal Pradesh considered its last real stronghold.

Why a shy animal in a city's backyard matters

Pangolins are nocturnal, solitary, and built to avoid being seen — when threatened, they simply roll into an armored ball. That makes confirmed sightings, rather than tracks or secondhand reports, genuinely rare data points for conservationists trying to work out where the species still survives.

A population surviving in forest fragments this close to a state capital suggests Shillong's urban-edge woodland still holds enough cover and prey (mainly ants and termites) to support one of the world's most threatened mammal groups.

Pangolins are the most heavily trafficked wild mammals on Earth, hunted across Asia and Africa for scales that have no proven medicinal value but command high prices in illegal wildlife markets.

The bigger trafficking problem

That trafficking pressure is exactly why a record like this matters beyond one grainy nighttime photo. All eight pangolin species worldwide are now protected under CITES Appendix I, the strictest international trade category, after decades of poaching pushed several populations toward collapse.

For Meghalaya, the detection adds the Chinese pangolin to a growing list of elusive, threatened species confirmed by WII's camera-trap survey — alongside the masked palm civet and the Indian crested porcupine. Each new record helps conservation planners draw more accurate maps of where enforcement and habitat protection are most urgently needed.

Researchers plan to keep the cameras running in the same forest patches, hoping for repeat sightings that could confirm whether this is a resident animal or a rare transient. Either way, conservationists say, the fact that a critically endangered species can still turn up steps from a city of more than 350,000 people is a small but genuine reason for hope.

More detail on the sighting is available via The Better India, and background on the species' conservation status is published by the IUCN Red List.