SAMBALPUR: With a new Royal Bengal Tiger making its way into Debrigarh Wildlife Sanctuary, the Forest department has approached the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) to establish its geographical origin and dispersal history. The NTCA can assist in identifying its source population through photographic records and individual stripe-pattern matching.
Official sources said the NTCA can facilitate identification of the landscape from which it might have dispersed to Debrigarh. The request was made through a letter on November 10, a day after the male tiger was detected in the sanctuary.
The exercise is expected to establish whether the big cat has been recorded in any of the country’s tiger reserves or other forest landscapes. The animal is believed to have entered the sanctuary through the Dechuan-Lakhanpur forest stretch from neighbouring Chhattisgarh.
For Debrigarh, the exercise assumes importance as a promising habitat for large carnivores. Its geographical position also makes it an important landscape for potential connectivity between tiger-bearing forests of central India and Odisha. Scientifically establishing the origin and route of the newly arrived tiger could help assess the functionality of these connections and strengthen landscape-level conservation planning.
The scientific exercise is not without precedent in Debrigarh. A similar photographic identification exercise had earlier helped forest authorities trace the movement history of a previous male tiger that occupied the sanctuary between 2022 and 2024.
According to a Wildlife Institute of India (WII) report from 2022, the individual, identified as Debrigarh_U52225, was matched with photographic records of a tiger captured in Kaghaznagar, Telangana, in 2018. The WII’s Tiger Cell established the match using the animal’s distinctive stripe patterns, with separate database references for its left and right flanks. The report recorded that the tiger was first photographed as a cub in Kaghaznagar and subsequently moved into Odisha through the Udanti-Sitanadi Tiger Reserve in Chhattisgarh.
The tracking exercise demonstrated how individual tigers can be identified across geographical landscapes even when they are photographed years apart. Their unique stripe patterns serve as natural identifiers, allowing researchers to compare camera-trap images with records in the National Tiger Database.
Tigers, particularly young males, often leave their natal territories in search of suitable habitats, prey availability and breeding opportunities.