Missing Tigers And Low Tech Support Hamper Conservation
The Royal Bengal is the most protected animal in India and its population is booming, but missing tigers are the weakest link in the conservation success story.
There’s hardly any mechanism to monitor tigers that have strayed out of their designated habitat. The flaw keeps drifters out of the loop and the forest officials have no clue about them.
Among the missing tigers in recent times was Ookhan of Tadoba-Andhari in Maharashtra. He was found this March at a place about 100km away from where he was spotted last almost four years ago.
The photograph taken in 2013 helped track the seven-year-old male. Stripe patterns are unique to every tiger and that is their identity marker.
Ookhan is a lucky break on a long list of tigers that went missing and never found.
The Maharashtra forest department has yet to trace Jai, the iconic tiger of Nagpur’s Umred Karhandla wildlife sanctuary, who went missing on April 18, 2016.
A year later, and after searches across Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, forest officials have no clue if the animal with a radio collar around its neck is alive or dead.
Ookhan or Jai are not stray cases. It is quite common in the wild for dominant tigers occupying the rich prey base to push out the weaker ones to the hinterland.
A tiger’s territory range from 10 to 12 square km, and the number of tigers moving out to different zones for food and water has increased recently with their population rising on the back of conservation efforts.