BENGALURU: Prahas Pattem, a Class X student with the International School, shares various interests with his buddies. But there is one hobby that is singularly Prahas’.
Even as a child he had a deep love for animals and the wildlife, and recently he was part of a tiger conservation project at Dandeli-Anshi Tiger Reserve (DATR).
The title of the project was ‘A study of camera trap survey as an effective tool for tiger conservation’. Prahas was keen to learn this technique and he wanted to know how the forest department officials track the movements of the tigers for the survey. Footage from the camera traps are usually analyzed by the State Forest Department personnel, to monitor the movements of the tigers.
Prahas took a keen interest in this project because he had heard that tigers were endangered, and he wanted to do his bit to reverse that. “Camera trap survey is an effective tool to identify the population of tigers in our forests,” he says. “There are few tigers left and, using this method, we can check if their numbers are increasing or falling. I wanted to learn it from the forest department officials.”
He went into the forest along with the department personnel to place the cameras and interacted with the locals to track the movement of the tigers. In addition, he also made deductions from the statistical data provided by the forest department.
Prahas started with this project in the beginning of January 2015 and did it through March that year. His study used the data generated through the camera-trap survey, conducted across 94 locations, by placing two camera units at each location. These locations were selected based on the inputs from the field staff who had surveyed the forest roads as well as the tigers’ tracks.
The sampling was done for 49 days in each block.
While browsing through the footage, the team was able to identify poachers, who the police later arrested. “The biggest challenge during the survey was camera theives,” he says. “Locals used to steal them from the forest... the department officials spoke to them and helped them understand why the cameras must not be disturbed.”
Camera Trap
A ‘camera trap’ is essentially a camera, which is equipped with a motion sensor or an infrared sensor. This can be activated remotely. ‘Camera trapping’ has always been used to capture the images of wild animals, when researchers cannot be present. These cameras are designed for outdoor use and are placed in metal boxes opposite to each other, so as to capture both flanks of the wild animal that passes between them.