The West Bengal Forest Department has radio collared a tiger in the Sunderban Tiger Reserve and released it in the wild. The initiative has been taken by wildlife wing of West Bengal Forest Department in collaboration with the World Wild Fund for Nature-India (WWF) India is aimed at ‘Assessing Tiger-Human Interactions through Radio-Telemetry’.
According to senior forest officials, the process of radio collaring was conducted on December 26 and 27 (Saturday and Sunday) in Harikhali beat under Bashirat range in Sundarban. A male tiger was radio collared and released in wild.
“The West Bengal Forest Department has always given priority to the scientific management of biodiversity in the Sundarban biosphere reserve and such initiatives will help the managers to safeguard tigers, their habitat, and the human population, as well as help in understanding the habitat utilisation pattern along with the behaviour of this keystone species,” Vinod Kumar Yadav, Principal Chief Conservator of Forest-Wildlife and Chief Wildlife Warden said.
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Along with Mr. Yadav, Tapas Das, Field Director, Sundarban Tiger Reserve, and Deepak Reddy, Deputy Field Director of the Sundarban Tiger Reserve, were present during the radio collaring and release of the tiger.
The officials said that there are plans to place satellite radio collars on three more tigers in the Sundarbans. “The development assumes significance as the data from satellite telemetry will be primarily used to study interactions between tigers and human populations one of the first times in the regions. The human-tiger interaction is crucial to the survival of the Sunderbans’ tigers and we hope that the effort will bring in inputs in managing the conflict,” said Ratul Saha, landscape coordinator, Sundarbans WWF India.
Studying tigers in the Sunderbans, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a Ramsar site, has always been a challenge because of the difficult landscape, which comprises of dense mangrove forests, with creeks and rivulets and floods twice a day during high tides. Sunderbans are the only mangrove forest in the world with a tiger population. The last estimation of tigers in Sunderbans in 2019-20 had shown that the number of tigers in the reserve had increased to 96.
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