BENGALURU: While the tiger population in India and Karnataka is rising, the state’s annual tiger prey census has confirmed that the big cats are also migrating long distances across the country. The report stresses the need for undisturbed and continuous forest patches with a good prey base to facilitate such migration.
This is highlighted in Karnataka’s annual census, “Status Of Tigers, Prey and Other Mammals, in Tiger Reserves of Karnataka for 2024”, prepared by the Karnataka forest department’s tiger cell, and released on Thursday by Forest Minister Eshwar B Khandre.
The report noted that tigers have travelled from 49 km to even 200-260 km in search of prey and safer habitats. It showed that while the prey base of spotted deer in Bandipur and Nagarhole is high, there is a decline in the population of other herbivores. There is also a need to improve the prey base in other tiger reserves like Kali, Bhadra and BRT, the report states.
“It is not just interesting, but also a matter of curiosity about how tigers communicate and find safe habitats over such long distances. A case study showed that a tiger which was released at one location was trying to find his way back to the spot from where it was captured, which was 360 km away,” said a forest official.
Elephants are long-ranging animals, and it has been observed that an adult tusker with sub-adults in the group can travel up to 200-300 km, exploring habitats. This is besides their well-known sharp memory of their hereditary migratory path, the official explained.
Additional Principal Chief Conservator of Forests Kumar Pushkar, who worked on the report, said that in 2023, the tiger population in the five tiger reserves in Karnataka was 408, which reduced to 393. “The reduction was because of their migration from one reserve to another.
The report has been prepared based on the Phase-4 monitoring method where camera trap images were tabulated. So less number could also be because the tiger was not captured in the camera trap. While the all-India exercise involved conducting the census once in four years as per Central government guidelines, in all tiger states it is done annually,” he said.