NILGIRIS: A five-year-old male Nilgiri tahr, which was being monitored using a radio collar since December 2024, has been preyed on by a tiger at Western Catchments near Avalanche in the Mukurthi forest range in the Nilgiris district on Friday.
The forest department has fixed a camera trap and started monitoring the movements of big cats in the area. The slain Nilgiri Tahr was radio collared on December 6, 2024.
Its death was revealed after a Mukurthi forest range officer who was about to collect the GPS data of the state animal on Friday morning found there were data as well as movement of the animal.
Soon a forest team led by Mukurthi forest range officer M Yuvarajkumar carried out field inspection using the animal's last GPS location and found it had been preyed on by a carnivore along the Devil's Gap watercourse near the shola patches.
Subsequently, the range officer engaged Assistant Veterinary Surgeon K Rajesh Kumar of the Theppakkadu elephant camp for carrying out the postmortem.
"The tiger had consumed most of the body of the Nilgiri tahr but left behind the radio collar and its head. We also noticed fresh pug marks and tiger scat indicating that the Nilgiri tahr was eaten by a tiger. We saw tiger movement 200 metre from the spot where the tahr's partial carcass was found," said Yuvaraj Kumar.
"The dead tahr had travelled more than 15 km in the surroundings of Devils Gap where the grasses were abundant. Our staff also recorded the movement of the tiger on the M-stripes app and fixed camera traps as part of monitoring the tiger movement," he said.
The officials have sent the hair and tissue samples from the skull of the slain Nilgiri tahr along with the tiger scat to confirm killing by tiger.
This is the second such incident in the Mukurthi forest range in the last one-and-a-half years, the previous reported on July 19, 2024 when a seven-year-old, radio-collared male Nilgiri tahr was killed by a tiger on July 18. Officials are investigating whether the same tiger had killed both the Nilgiri tahrs.