11 stray tigers of Pilibhit Tiger Reserve lodged in UP zoos in 9 years over man-animal conflict

PILIBHIT: The Pilibhit Tiger Reserve (PTR) lost 11 tigers since 2014 to Uttar Pradesh’s zoos as these tigers had strayed in rural areas and were engaged in man-animal conflicts.
In addition to that, three stray tigers were captured for their release in parts of Dudhwa Tiger Reserve(DTR) during this period.

Wildlife experts have stated that this alarming situation is swayed by the reserve’s shrinking forest area due to illegal possessions, massive human infiltration in core forest regions, scarce breadth of the reserve, and the dwindling prey base.

The encroachment on wild corridors for agriculture and construction of houses is an additional factor posing hindrance in the natural dispersal of the growing population of tigers leading to their straying.
The official records of PTR show that its physical area stretched across 73,024.98 hectares of land shrunk by 3,642 acres due to illegal possessions. However, wildlife enthusiasts fear that the actual encroachment on forest lands is more than the identified area.
Despite the breadth of PTR varying between 3 and 9 kilometers, it has reduced to merely 100 to 200 meters at some pockets in the Haripur forest range. According to locals, water body ‘Chapatia tal’ was an integral part of the forest range 20 years back, but it is now located on the agricultural belt adjoining the PTR.
GC Mishra, a former field director of DTR, said, “Regardless of what the official records of PTR show, the prey base for tigers in the reserve has declined rapidly. This has left no other option for the felines but to move to agricultural fields where they find nilgai (blue bull), wild boar, and stray cattle in abundance.”
“The unbridled barging of villagers in the core forest area for illegal felling of trees is also a disruptive factor on the tigers’ habitat. This also forces the tigers to stray into the fields and nearby areas and attack the locals,” he added.
Dr Pranav Chanchani, country tiger head at World Wide Fund for Nature- India, said that insufficient boundaries of PTR could be one of the reasons for tigers’ straying to human settlements due to their inability in differentiating between the wild grasslands and the cropped fields.
He said, “The removal of encroachments from wild corridors, their heedful maintenance, and a comprehensive plan to set up new corridors having contiguity up to Shukla Phanta national park of Nepal, East Terai forest division of Uttarakhand, and Kishanpur wildlife sanctuary of Dudhwa tiger reserve could reduce the intensity of the problem as tigers would get passages to traverse safely.”
Notably, PTR bagged the first global award, TX2, among 13 tiger range countries in November 2020 for doubling the population of tigers in less than 4 years.