Saturday, 05 October 2024
Saturday, 05 October 2024
A tiger’s 100km transboundary trek between Sikkim and Bhutan has been recorded in the camera for the first time, The Telegraph reported on Saturday.
Forest officials have spotted the same tiger in Sikkim’s Pangolakha Wildlife Sanctuary and Bhutan’s Samtse district earlier this year.
The camera trap images of the tiger at Pangolakha were taken in February; those at Samtse were taken in April. The two areas are separated by 100km.
Tigers often disperse across large distances, and even leopards have been known to traverse large distances to get ‘home’. Here are some past instances.
Walker: The tiger who traversed 3,000km
The longest recorded journey undertaken by a royal Bengal tiger was in 2019, when a big cat fondly named “Walker” by forest officials completed a 3,000km journey. Starting from Maharashtra in 2019, Walker travelled through seven districts before settling in Dnyanganga sanctuary. Wildlife officials then considered moving a female tiger to the sanctuary to provide a mating partner for Walker.
Maharashtra to Odisha, a tiger’s trail
Last year, a male tiger from Tadoba in Maharashtra journeyed 2,000 km to Odisha. This tiger, identified by its stripes – Indian wildlife officials now have software to identify individual tigers by their stripes – travelled through four states, overcoming various obstacles. The tiger did not attack any humans during its extensive trek.
C1’s journey from Maharashtra to Telangana
In 2019, another tiger named C1 by forest officials walked over 1,300 km through Maharashtra and Telangana for 150 days, seeking new territory and prey. Part of a study by Maharashtra forest department and the Wildlife Institute of India, C1's journey from Tipeshwar to Dnyanganga Wildlife Sanctuary provided valuable insights into tiger dispersal patterns.
Leopards do it too: Ajoba’s long walk to Mumbai
Ajoba, an elderly male that was the first leopard to be fitted with a radio collar in Maharashtra, travelled over 120 km from Malshej Ghat in Maharashtra to the Sanjay Gandhi National Park near Mumbai in just 29 days back in 2019. He was named Ajoba – which means grandfather in Marathi – by the wildlife scientists who tranquillised it. Ajoba's journey was fictionalised and made into a Marathi film, with Bollywood star Urmila Matondkar playing Vidya Athreya, the leopard scientist. Ajoba’s stunning journey – through densely populated towns and villages, never attacking any human being, from a forest to the urban sprawl of greater Mumbai – provided valuable insight into leopard behaviour and shaped Maharashtra’s response to then-growing leopard attacks. Gradually, Maharashtra moved away from translocating captured leopards to faraway forests. Leopard attacks also diminished as a result.
