The Andhra Pradesh Forest Department is gearing up to count the number of big cats in the State from April. The ‘tiger estimation’ exercise will be continue till the onset of the rainy season.
The exercise will also culminate with the All India Tiger Estimate-22 (AITE-22), the tiger population census that is conducted once in four years.
The AITE is conducted by the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) in collaboration with the State Forest Departments. It was started in 2006, and the last estimate was done in 2018-19.
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Principal Chief Conservator of Forests (PCCF) N. Prateep Kumar says that the annual estimate helps in keeping a tab on the tiger population and take steps to conserve the tigers.
Training programmes have been conducted for the personnel in grid making, fixing cameras, etc. In all, 2,000 field staff will be deployed in the exercise that will also cover the co-predators and prey. The department will fix motion sensor cameras at the locations where tiger territories have been identified.
“During the estimation done earlier, it was found that the tiger population had risen to 60. The department has camera trap images of each of the 60 tigers. The remarkable rise in their numbers is due to the persistent conservation efforts of the department through the local community and intense patrolling. The tiger habitat is expanding, and it covers a significant area of the Nallamala forest and the Seshachalam hill range. The presence of the big cat has been found in Papikondalu also,” says Mr. Prateep Kumar.
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Sophisticated equipment
The exercise begins with the installation of sophisticated cameras with infrared sensors, which are put in pairs. The department will utilise the services of local tribes such as the Chenchus in fixing and relocating the cameras. The tribal people will act as trackers for protecting and monitoring the tigers. The cameras trap millions of photographs. It is a big task in evaluating the data, as each and every photograph has to be analysed, he explains.
The camera trap images help in identifying the individual big cats through stripe pattern and other physical features. Also, it is possible to arrive at their count in a more accurate manner compared to the collection of pug marks. The stripes of tiger are like fingerprints of a human being. The stripes of each tiger are unique and do not match with the other tigers, he says.