KOLKATA: Armed with 1,464 all-weather night-vision cameras placed in 732 strategic locations called grids, the West Bengal forest department is conducting its annual exercise to count the number of big cats in the Sunderbans, the world’s only mangrove tiger habitat.
The camera trap exercise to get an estimate number of tigers is likely to get over by first week of January next year.
The final report of the last national count, Status of Tigers 2022, was released by the National Tiger Conservation Authority on July 29, the International Tiger Day, and the exercise pegged the number of tigers in India at 3,682 and a total of 101 big cats were spotted in the Sunderbans.
The census conducted by the Centre is a quadrennial exercise and the annual exercise is performed by the forest departments of the states. “Last month, a field training session was held and around 50 people, who learned about the camera settings and how to retrieve data from them, have been engaged in the census exercise,” said an officer of the Sunderban Tiger Reserve.
The Sunderbans is spread across 10,000 sqkm, little over 4,000 sqkm of which is in India and the rest is in Bangladesh. The Indian Sunderbans is split between the STR and the South 24 Parganas forest division.
In 2021-22, the findings of the state-level census were not released as the national census was under way. In 2020-21, a total of 96 tigers were counted in the Sunderbans.
The last national count, which estimated 101 tigers in the Sunderbans, counted 81 of them in the STR and the rest in the South 24-Parganas division. “Each 2 sqkm grid has a pair of cameras placed in opposite directions. The annual state-level exercise is to estimate the number of tigers based on the findings of the trap cameras. In comparison, the national count is a much bigger and detailed exercise. It considers several other factors in a habitat, like prey base and human interference,” said an official.