India, Nov. 29 -- The Banasura Chilappan is a mountain bird of few certainties. It keeps to the deep shadows of Camel's Hump, one of Wayanad's most fragile highlands, where patches of moss-covered shola forest cling to slopes that tremble under climate extremes.

Sightings are rare. It slips between the foliage rather than commanding attention, a quiet messenger of the delicate pulse of the Western Ghats, to which this northern district of Kerala belongs.

Yet that very vulnerability has given the Chilappan a strange power. It has become a symbol of Wayanad's ecological anxieties and of the existential threats circling its forests.

Camel's Hump, the Chilappan's home, now stands in the path of the controversial Wayanad tunnel road project...