When the Coronavirus lockdown was announced on March 24 and everyone headed home, a lone tiger too was in search of a permanent place and a mate to establish its territory.
Called Walker C-1, the tiger has been under camera surveillance from March 28, after it was found to have settled down in Dhyanganga sanctuary in Buldhana district, Maharashtra. The tiger — one of the three cubs of tigress T1 — was radio-collared on February 27, 2019, in its birth place, the Tipeshwar Wildlife Sanctuary in Yavatmal district, Maharashtra.
Born in late 2016, the sub-adult male tiger was part of a project of the Wildlife Institute of India (WII), Dehradun, to study the dispersal of tigers across the eastern Vidarbha landscape. It traversed 3,020 kilometres across Maharashtra and Telangana in 13 months, as per GPS trackings scientifically recorded.
Over the months, 6,240 GPS locations were picked up and the animal was found to have normal predation patterns and achieved all the skills to survive and avoid humans, according to a report by the team of scientists and researchers at WII, comprising Bilal Habib, Parag Nigam and Zehidul Hussain. Citing this as the longest journey ever taken by a collared tiger in the country, the team submitted its report to the Principal Chief Conservator of Forests (Wildlife) and Chief Wildlife Warden of Maharashtra Nitin Kakodkar.
Shadow on the move
The report says that the movement of C-1 has opened new conservation challenges for dispersing tigers. The animal has shown the ability to traverse human-dominated landscapes virtually unseen and without any conflict.
“Tigers are known to cover long distances across human-dominated non-forested landscapes in search of new territories and mates and they sometimes challenge the traditional understanding of wildlife conservationists,” says Shekhar Kumar Niraj, Director of Advanced Institute for Wildlife Conservation, Chennai. “Primarily a territorial species, tigers are known to move for different reasons such as scarcity of food, competition from other tigers, family disintegration or ecological reasons,” he adds.
C-1 has now marked 52 sq km as its core habitat inside the 205 sq km Dhyanganga sanctuary and the surrounding forest area as its buffer. The decision to drop its radio collar through a remote-controlled operation was taken last month by forest officials due to battery issues and the risk of the device choking the animal.
Now, a plan to release a female tiger in Walker C-1’s territory has been drawn up by a five-member expert committee constituted by Nitin. The committee is yet to be meet due to the current lockdown.
According to the WII team members, the radio-collared tiger was found to extensively explore the forest area of Tipeshwar in the first four months. When it could not find a suitable and unoccupied area to settle till about monsoon, it dispersed out of the sanctuary on June 21, 2019, and traversed six districts of Maharashtra.
The big cat was jointly tracked by Maharashtra Forest department and WII, through GPS satellite and VHF ground tracking. The tiger kept moving through different forested areas, protected areas, territorial forests and animal corridors.
The Field Director of Pench Tiger Reserve, Ravi Kiran, notes that Walker C-1 also strayed into Adilabad division in Telangana and spent considerable time across inter-State forests of Adilabad and Nanded divisions during August and September last year. It criss-crossed several forest divisions and districts crossing human-dominated landscapes, agricultural fields and canals, villages and highways before making its final way to Dhyanganga sanctuary. All this at a time when the world was preparing to usher in the new year and still largely oblivious to the outbreak of COVID-19.
Inside Dhyanganga sanctuary, the tiger took another three months to mark its territory. The Field Director of Melghat Tiger Reserve in Amravathi, Maharashtra, MS Reddy describes the chosen wildlife sanctuary as one with “a good prey base”.
Till now, there were no tigers in Dhyanganga and with Walker C-1 defining its home range here, wildlife experts will now keep their fingers crossed till the next tiger census in 2022.
