No tiger spotted in three years at Palamau reserve
Scat collection is a continuous process. Fresh scats are being collected and sent to WII. A WII team also visited PTR recently. We hope to see a positive result in future.
PK VERMA, principal chief conservator of forest (wildlife)
RANCHI: One of India’s first tiger habitats, declared a protected forest reserve in 1973 when Project Tiger was launched, may have lost all its tigers, according to two crucial scientific methods to track big cats in the wild.
No tiger has been seen in Palamau Tiger Reserve (PTR) on camera trap pictures clicked since 2016, and a scat analysis (in which feces are used to identify animals) conducted this year has found no evidence of a tiger in the forest, according to officials familiar with the matter.
Once officially confirmed, this will make PTR the third reserve in the country — after Sariska in Rajasthan and Panna in Madhya Pradesh — from where tigers vanished, even though the national population of tigers has risen from 1,114 in 2006 to 2,226 in 2014. Tigers have been relo- cated to Sariska and Panna over the last decade. The population is 17 tigers, including cubs, and 37 in the two reserves respectively.
A national tiger census has been underway since 2018 and its findings are expected to be published in May 2019. The scat analysis and camera traps are part of the 2018 All India Tiger Estimation’s (AITE) comprehensive methodology to calculate the tiger population in the country.
Principal chief conservator of forest (wildlife), Jharkhand, PK Verma, said on Sunday that no evidence of tiger presence — either direct (camera trap) or indirect
(scat analysis) — has been found in recent times. “But scat collection is a continuous process. Fresh scats are being collected and sent to WII [the Dehradun-based Wildlife Institute of India]. A WII team also visited PTR recently. We hope to see a positive result in future,” he said.
The 84 samples analysed by WII have so far not shown the presence of a tiger. “The analysis is based on the initial samples which we received from PTR. We are still collecting more scat samples from there. Once we analyse them, we will be able to tell about exact tiger status,” said Dr Kausik Banerjee, a scientist at the WII’S tiger cell.
What are camera traps?
Cameras installed in reserves to get pictures of animals to estimate their population in wild. As stripes are unique to each tiger, their number can be estimated with help of pictures
What is scat analysis?
1973 2010 2014
India’s tiger population 2,226
Presence of animals can be estimated via DNA in feces
(scat). This is second method to find animal, if the camera traps miss them.
Earlier studies in the United
States had suggested that wolf and bear numbers could be estimated via DNA in feces 2006 2010 2014 Other reserves that lost tigers: Sariska in 2004 and Panna in 2009
1,114
1995
1,706