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Krishnan kept returning to crows, mynas, squirrels, roadside trees and backyard weeds instead of chasing rare species in remote reserves. Creatures seen daily are the ones people stop looking at, so patient, repeated attention to them turns up behaviour and seasonal change that a single visit to a spectacular place cannot reveal.
Dry deciduous scrub, thorn jungle and open grassland are often officially classed as degraded 'waste' fit for plantations or development. Krishnan argues these landscapes hold their own specialised communities, such as blackbuck, dry-country birds and drought-adapted plants. Planting them over with commercial trees counts as afforestation on paper but destroys habitat on the ground.
Predators such as the dhole (Indian wild dog) have been branded vermin and hunted because they compete with human interests or seem cruel in how they kill. Krishnan holds that an animal's place must be judged by its role in its own community, not by human sentiment or economic convenience. Labels like 'vermin' say more about the labeller than about the animal.
Krishnan's method is to record exactly what an animal does, including posture, timing, sound and context, and to refuse to credit it with human feelings or morals. Sentimental projection, whether cute or villainous, replaces what actually happened with a story about ourselves. Accurate, unadorned description is the only reliable ground for both understanding and conserving wildlife.
Krishnan photographed Indian wildlife over decades in black and white, using equipment he assembled and adapted himself, including long-focus lens rigs. His images and essays came from the same slow, low-budget, self-reliant practice, showing that serious natural-history documentation needed patience and craft more than expensive technology.