BENGALURU: After an eight-day search operation, forest officials finally captured the elusive leopard prowling at Electronics City late on Tuesday night. The animal was released into a conducive habitat after a thorough medical examination on Wednesday.
According to forest officials, the operation to capture the spotted cat was different from what is normally undertaken. “Here we used thermal drone cameras 24x7 for four days and nights. We also held meetings with IT professionals and industry employees, giving them a list of dos and don’ts. We also installed many cages and kept shifting them based on the leopard’s movement,” said a senior forest official.
Officials also decided to keep the entire operation a secret. “After the Kudlu incident wherein a leopard was shot dead during the capture operation, we did not want people gathering in large numbers and hampering the tracking operation,” the official said.
The leopard was captured just a day before the visit of Union Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia to the Centre for Development of Telematics in Electronics City.
It is a male leopard aged four-five years. “It is healthy with no injuries and all its canines are intact. It had made the region, located around 14 km from Bannerghatta National Park, its home for the last three months. The area has an abundance of food -- street dogs, peacocks and small herbivores. It was trapped in a ‘Tumakuru’ cage. We can say that this is the first successful and smooth capture operation in a city like Bengaluru,” the official said.
Tumkuru cages are large cages measuring 20x20 sqft. They do not look like cages as they are blended with vegetation. Three or more baits are kept. They are not like the usual cages, which have a small opening where the animal is made to crawl in.
“The animal was captured between 11.50 pm and 12 am. It would not have moved around much for three days after hunting a street dog. Hence, it was not sighted by people for long,” the official added.
On September 17, around 3 am, the CCTV camera at Electronic City toll plaza recorded the leopard. A CCTV at Nettur Technical Training Foundation had also captured the leopard wandering outside its boundary. Electronics City houses institutions like Wipro, Infosys, Biocon, Tata Consultancy, ITI and many other companies.
The forest staffers have also issued notice to industrial areas and tech companies to keep their premises clean of bushes, weeds, shrubs and garbage waste, which provide safe spaces for leopards.