Catching a Royal Bengal Tiger is tough. Catching an intelligent tigress “addicted” to livestock is tougher, forest officials and veterinarians in Assam are finding out.
F03, the tigress that strayed out of the 78.81 sq. km. Orang National Park in November 2017, has given her potential captors the slip at least a dozen times since. Officials said she could even be out-thinking their moves.
Nothing works
Nothing that the officials have tried — from building an isolated cattle shed with live food inside to using baits in a camouflaged cage — has worked so far. To make things worse, one of the veterinarians on the job fractured his leg on Sunday morning after falling from the back of an elephant startled by the presence of the tigress nearby.
As the patience of people in seven villages covering a 6 sq. km. area wears thin, wildlife experts fear the tigress could be too smart for her own safety.
“A tiger that took the same route as the tigress to prey on livestock of farmers last year, was poisoned. We need to do something fast for the safety of the tigress as well as the villagers, but she seems to be always a step ahead of us,” Orang’s Divisional Forest Officer Ramesh Gogoi said.
F03 is one of 24 striped cats estimated as part of Orang National Park’s 2017 tiger census.
Park officials said she has made a cluster of villages 3 km upstream of National Highway 52 on the northern edge of Orang her hunting ground.
“For a park that has the highest density of tigers in the country, space is hard to come by. This could be a reason why she has ventured out for easier kills,” Mr. Gogoi said.
“We put up cameras along the route the tigress kept using. The image from one of the cameras last Friday night confirmed the tigress to be F03.”
“She was captured from near where a pig was tied as a bait not far from one of three machans (treetop platform to keep a watch on animals below) in her prowling area. But she avoided the pig, travelled 2 km to a village beyond the Dhansiri river to eat another pig,” the Assam Forest Department’s Dhansiri division DFO Madhurjya K. Sarma told The Hindu.
Tigers in the wild hunt during the day. But F03, officials said, has taken a nocturnal turn preferring to prey on animals when the villagers are asleep.