B.R. Hills

About B.R. Hills

Biligiri Rangana Hills — B.R. Hills, or BRT for short — is one of those places on a Karnataka map that looks like a footnote next to Mysore and Bangalore but turns out to matter a great deal more than its size suggests. The range climbs to just over 5,000 feet along the Karnataka–Tamil Nadu border, and it forms a genuinely rare piece of geography: an ecological stepping stone linking the wetter Western Ghats to the drier Eastern Ghats, letting species and gene flow move between two mountain systems that would otherwise be cut off from each other.

That connecting role is exactly why the hills carry Tiger Reserve status, granted in 2011 and spread across more than 539 square kilometres of forest. It is a smaller, quieter reserve than Bandipur or Nagarhole further west, and that relative obscurity is part of the appeal — fewer vehicles, fewer crowds, and a forest that still feels genuinely wild rather than managed for tourist volume.

The range takes its name from the Biligiriranga Swamy temple that sits at the hill's summit, dedicated to a form of Vishnu as Ranganatha, and the pilgrimage traffic to that temple predates the wildlife tourism by a long way — this was a sacred hill long before it was a mapped tiger corridor. Both identities coexist today: visitors can trek up to the temple for its own sake, or come purely for the safari circuit, and most people end up doing a bit of both without planning to.

What sets B.R. Hills apart from Karnataka's other reserves, though, is its human history. The Soliga people have lived in and depended on this forest for generations, and in 2011 — the same year the tiger reserve was formally declared — a landmark ruling recognised the Soliga community's habitat rights inside the sanctuary under India's Forest Rights Act, the first time such rights were granted to a community living inside a tiger reserve anywhere in the country. That case is still cited in conservation and indigenous-rights circles well beyond Karnataka, and it shapes how the reserve is managed today: Soliga guides work the safari and trekking circuits, and community-run enterprises operate alongside the government eco-tourism infrastructure rather than being pushed out by it.

Part of what the Soliga rights ruling protected was a traditional forest economy that predates the reserve by centuries — the community's honey collection, minor forest produce gathering, and small-scale agriculture inside designated zones. Visitors sometimes get a taste of this directly: several eco-tourism operations in the area sell Soliga-harvested wild honey and other forest produce, and guided walks led by Soliga naturalists tend to surface details about plants, animal tracking and forest use that a standard forest-department guide would not necessarily know.

The temple at the summit deserves a mention of its own beyond just explaining the hill's name. Biligiriranga Swamy is worshipped here as a form of Vishnu, and the shrine draws a steady stream of pilgrims independent of the wildlife tourism calendar, with its own festival calendar and rituals that continue regardless of safari bookings. Reaching it typically involves a forest-department-regulated drive or trek up to the summit rather than free unguided hiking, both for visitor safety in tiger habitat and to limit disturbance to wildlife corridors — a small inconvenience that is easy to forgive once you are standing at the top with the forest canopy stretching out in every direction.

If you only have time for one wildlife destination near Mysore, B.R. Hills is worth choosing over the bigger-name reserves precisely because it combines a genuine conservation story, a living pilgrimage tradition, and comparatively light tourist traffic in one compact hill range.

Carry water, sun protection and binoculars if you have them; forest-department vehicles provide the safari transport, but the walking sections near the temple and camp benefit from decent shoes and a bit of stamina.

Wildlife & Best Time to Visit

The reserve's wildlife list reads like a proper Western Ghats checklist: tigers and leopards at the top of the food chain, elephants moving through in herds that can number in the dozens, gaur (Indian bison) grazing in the more open grassland patches, and sloth bears, sambar and spotted deer filling out the picture. Birdlife is genuinely excellent too, with the mixed deciduous and evergreen forest supporting everything from hornbills to raptors, which makes B.R. Hills a worthwhile stop even for visitors who are lukewarm about big-cat safaris specifically.

Sightings of tigers and leopards are, honestly, a matter of luck rather than guarantee here, as at any Indian reserve — but elephants, gaur, deer and birdlife are reliably visible on most safari drives, which keeps the odds of an interesting outing high even on a quiet day. October through May is the recommended window: the monsoon months make forest tracks difficult and reduce visibility, while the cooler, drier months bring animals out to more open water sources and grassland, improving the chances of a good sighting.