This page is a jungle in southern Asia. Move your pointer across the forest floor and your animal will pad, stride, strut or wind after you. Choose a different animal at the bottom, and tap the notes to open them.
Central India right now checking the sky…
Every tiger's stripes are different, like fingerprints. Even its skin is striped under the fur.
Tigers are strong swimmers and lie in pools to keep cool.
A tiger's roar can be heard nearly two miles away.
It creeps close, then rushes. Even so, most hunts fail: perhaps one in ten or twenty succeeds.
The white spot on the back of each ear may help cubs to follow their mother through long grass.
Apart from mothers with cubs, tigers live and hunt alone, each in its own large territory.
Meet them all
Panthera tigris
The biggest of the cats: orange with black stripes, a white belly and a long ringed tail.
Elephas maximus
Smaller than the African elephant, with small ears, a domed head and a rounded back.
Pavo cristatus
A blue-necked bird with a little crown. The male trails a huge train of green feathers, each ending in an eye.
Ophiophagus hannah
A very long, olive-brown snake with pale bands, which can rear up and spread a narrow hood.
Pongo pygmaeus
A big, shaggy, orange ape with very long arms. Grown males have wide cheek pads.
Varanus komodoensis
The biggest lizard in the world: heavy, grey-brown and scaly, with a long yellow forked tongue.
Through the year
Jungle animals are there all year. In India, the dry months before the monsoon are when they are easiest to see, as they gather at water. The animal following you is shown in red.
Good to know
For a few months each year, winds off the ocean bring most of the year's rain in one go.
The word jungle comes from Hindi and Sanskrit. It first meant rough, wild land.
Different animals live at each level: on the ground, in the bushes, and in the treetops far above.
South-east Asia is made of thousands of islands, and many have animals found nowhere else.
Stripes and spots break up an animal's outline in the patchy light under the trees.
More than half the people on Earth live in Asia, so its wild animals live close to farms and villages.
Real photos of the animals on this page. Tap one to see it bigger.
Photos are from Wikimedia Commons and are used under free licences. They have been resized, and cropped where they appear in link previews. Open a photo to see who took it.
These animals do not all share one forest: tigers and peacocks are Indian, orangutans live in Borneo and Sumatra, and the dragon has a few small islands of its own. What they share is heat, rain and thick green cover.
Back to the topAnimals from other parts of the world live on their own pages: change area.