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Boom time in tiger land

Caught on camera: Photographs of tigers in Ranthambhore National Park taken by camera trap technique during the latest tiger census.

JAIPUR: Amid all the gloom on the tiger conservation front elsewhere in the country there is reason for cheer at Rajasthan’s Ranthambhore National Park where the big cats have increased their tribe.

The latest census in the Project Tiger park, carried out using the camera trap technique over the past two months, places their number at 44, a sizeable increase from the previous figure of 31 recorded during the census held two years ago.

Ranthambhore has been Rajasthan’s tiger conservation flagship.

Even when Sariska Tiger Reserve in the State had brought ignominy to the conservation movement in the country five years ago when all the big cats there fell to poaching, Ranthambhore tigers had burned bright.

The figures of the 2009 tiger census, which were scheduled to be released in the presence of Union Minister of State for Forests and Environment Jairam Ramesh at Sariska this past Sunday, are yet to be made public as the event was called off due to the three-day official mourning announced in the State over the weekend after the demise of former Rajasthan Chief Minister and Assam Governor Shiv Charan Mathur.

Out of the 44 tigers counted in Ranthambhore, six frequent the adjoining Sawai Man Singh sanctuary while another, a male, has been a resident of the nearby Kailadevi sanctuary for the past year and a half.

“No other park in India has shown such an increase in the number of wild tigers. The credit for the population boom should go to the staff at Ranthambhore who could create a conducive atmosphere for the animals in the park against all odds,” said the Principal Chief Conservator of Forests, R. N. Mehrotra, when contacted by The Hindu on the population figures. “As Time magazine once put it writing about Ranthmabhore, ‘the simple solutions’ worked,” he said.

“The Rajasthan model of conservation is simple. It is firmly rooted on the ground,” Mr. Mehrotra added.

“The park has been witnessing the trend for the past few years. The 2005 census, carried out in Ranthambhore by three agencies including the Wildlife Institute of India, had revealed the presence of 26 tigers. In 2007, when the camera trap technique was adopted countrywide to count the tigers, their number stood at 31 in Ranthambhore,” observed Rajpal Singh, a member of the State’s Empowered Committee on Wildlife and Conservation.

“We now have photographic evidence on the presence of all the tigers we are talking about,” he added.

This was not the first time the camera trap method was used for counting the tigers in a Rajasthan sanctuary.

The technique, first introduced by conservationist Ulhas Karant in Indian parks, was tried out a decade ago by the Ranthambhore Park authorities when doubts were raised about the accuracy of the water-hole counting and plaster cast/paw mark methods.

This time round 230 camera traps were set up in the Ranthambhore Park between March 21 and May 20 and remote-triggered cameras were used to take pictures of the wild animals.

“We created grids of 1x1 km within the park with each grid having a camera trap station. More than one lakh pictures were taken, out of which tiger photographs were analysed on the basis of capture and re-capture technique,” Mr. Mehotra revealed.

“Special marks are identified on their bodies as these marks are unique to each tiger. This technique has proven successful in the case of smaller sanctuaries though it may not be so effective in bigger parks like Kanha or Sundarbans,” said Mr. Mehrotra.

Asked about the rather steep increase in the numbers from 31 in 2007 to 44 by May 2009, Mr. Rajpal Singh said the real figure was more than was given out after the previous census as it had not taken into account the tiger cubs in the park.

“The mortality rate of the tiger cubs is very high. The previous figure could have been put around 34,” he confessed.

Even after considering this, there has been a huge upward leap by the Ranthambhore tiger!

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