The Hindu : National : Radio collaring of tigers in the Sunderbans

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Wednesday, Nov 23, 2005

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Radio collaring of tigers in the Sunderbans

Special Correspondent

Kolkata: For the first time, four tigers in the Sunderbans in West Bengal will be radio collared as part of a pilot project sanctioned by the Union Ministry of Environment and Forestry with the purpose of providing information on matters like habitat preferences and breeding behaviour of the animal. It will also make available critical inputs for the analysis of pugmarks to be tabulated during the biennial census of the tigers scheduled for January 2006.

The daily monitoring of the tigers as a prelude to the census operations was started in April and the data collated in the course of this year will be compared with the final census figures to make for a realistic count of tigers inhabiting the world's largest mangrove swamp. The tiger count in the Sunderbans in the last census was 274.

A software has now been made available which is expected to provide a high-level of accuracy on pugmark readings and will be employed in the coming tiger census in the Sunderbans, Atanu Raha, director, Sunderbans Biosphere Reserve and Chief Conservator of Forests, West Bengal, said here on Tuesday.

Delivering this year's Bengal Science Lectures on the "The Science and the Art of Counting Tigers", Prof. Madhav Gadgil of the Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, regretted the command-and-control approach employed by wild life managers across the country in wildlife studies and said that it should be replaced with a "share-and-inform regime".

Unless this was done and transparency ensured any census would suffer the possibility of being both flawed and manipulated.

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