There’s no accounting for leopards’ taste!

The tea gardens in West Bengal are fast becoming the favourite hunting grounds for leopards. The highly adaptable predators have been preying on livestock like goats and cattle — sometimes more than wild prey like deer — because of their easier availability.

The findings came in a study conducted by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). In their study, titled “Diet Selection of Leopards in a Human-Use Landscape in North-Eastern India”, conducted in a 408-km square area located in the Jalpaiguri district of West Bengal, wildlife researchers also noted that the spotted cats that inhabit the tea gardens and forest mosaic landscape of the State have been found to be highly adaptable to living in and around human habitation.

“We studied the prey composition and diet selection of leopards in a forest and tea-garden landscape in North-Eastern India where the population density is greater than 700 people per km square and average domestic animal density is 340 animals per square km. In contrast, wild prey density in the landscape was comparatively low at 56 animals per km square,” said lead author of the study Aritra Kshettry.

The team collected leopard faeces and analysed the samples for remains of a prey on hair found in the faeces.

“For the diet analysis, 70 scats which the researchers could confirm as leopard scats were used. Of these, 56 were collected within the forested areas and 14 were collected in human-dominated landscapes.

“Eighty per cent of the leopard diet was domestic prey with cattle and goats most preferred species. Among the wild prey, rhesus macaque contributed 10 per cent in the diet followed by rodents (2.56 per cent),” said the study co-authored by researchers Srinivas Vaidyanathan and Vidya Athreya.

“The domestic prey available to the leopard is six times higher than wild prey in the study area. This implies that leopards are feeding on whatever is more available to them and not necessarily choosing domestic prey over wild prey” said Kshettry.

The collaborative study between WCS -India Program, National Centre for Biological Sciences, Foundation of Ecological Research Advocacy and Learning, Idea Wild, the Rufford Foundation and West Bengal Forest Department also noted that the anthropogenic food resource allows carnivores like leopards to persist in tea-estates and non-forested areas in the landscape.

However, losses to people due to livestock kills can be fatal to the leopards in the form of conflicts.

“While on one hand, there is great scope for the persistence of large cats in dense human-use landscapes due to the availability of domestic prey, on the other hand, the study highlights the problems of livestock loss especially to poorer sections of the society which need to be reconciled for achieving long-term and sustainable conservation goals,” said the researchers.

The habitat of this region used to consist of moist deciduous and Sal forests which were converted to tea plantations by the Britishers during the colonial period in the late 1800s. The forests occur in Gorumara National Park and territorial forests of Jalpaiguri Division. Now, tea gardens cover a large part of the area with more than 70 tea estates in the district.