The elusive tiger for which the authorities had launched a search operation involving elephants and unmanned aerial surveillance vehicle, was found dead close to Nitturu village in the Tithimathi territorial range in Kodagu district on Sunday morning.
The tiger was around 9 to 10 years old and had sustained wounds on its face and body in a territorial fight with the emerging dominant male, which had ejected this cat from its domain. The tiger had stalked cattle in the villages close to the Nagarahole National Park boundary and had attacked Bolla alias Karia, a coffee estate worker in the early hours of Friday, following which a search operation was launched.
Three days of intensive land and aerial survey and combing operations had not yielded any results and even the camera traps installed at vantage points had failed to capture any image of the tiger. The combing operations covered more than 15 sq km of forest area along the Anechokur-Kalalla border abutting the Lakhmanatirtha river close to Nittur village where the tiger was finally found dead.
Post mortem reports will ascertain the cause of death and is expected to be completed later in the day.
This is the fifth tiger to have died in the past three weeks in the Nagarahole-Bandipur range and fourth in the Nagarahole range alone, which is attributed in some circles to increase in tiger density and hence the consequent high rate of deaths.
The 2014 country-wide tiger estimation results pegged the tiger population in Karnataka at 406 with Bandipur-Nagarahole landscape accounting for about 200 to 220 tigers between them. But with nearly 117 villages surrounding Nagarahole and around 150 villages around Bandipur, the conflict situation tends to escalate when old tigers are ejected from their territory and enter the periphery to stalk cattle and come into conflict with humans. Hence, there is a body of opinion calling for augmenting the buffer zone and extending it protection so that surplus population of predators are absorbed in these habitats.
