Tiger Spotted In Jharkhand Tiger Reserve After Stretch Of No Sightings

A tiger was spotted in Jharkhand's Palamau Tiger Reserve (PTR), a top forest official said on Tuesday.

The sighting of the tiger on Monday evening resulted in a wave of happiness among officials and employees of the Palamau Tiger Reserve.

The High Court of Jharkhand has recently wondered why Palamau Tiger Reserve should be called a tiger reserve since there are no tigers and observed that officers are not even aware of how many male and female big cats exist in Jharkhand.

Kumar Ashutosh, the Area Director of the reserve, told PTI that a healthy and young male tiger was spotted by a team of forest guards under Range Officer Tarun Kumar Singh at Baresad forest on Monday evening.

The team saw the tiger crossing the Medininagar-Mahuadandh road and moving from one forest to the other slowly from a distance of about 10 feet, the official said.

On seeing the tiger, the forest workers who were on a regular patrol for the safety of the wildlife kept an eye on it, the official said.

The Director said that, from this morning onwards, skilled forest guards have been deputed to collect the excreta-footprint (stug-pug route) of the tiger.

The Betla National Park located in Jharkhand's Palamau Tiger Reserve was thrown open for tourists on October 1 after it was closed during pandemic since March 2020.

Also, the counting for wild animals has begun in the Palamau Tiger Reserve, known globally for undertaking the world's first census for big cats as early as 1932.

For counting of wild animals 509 trap cameras have been installed in the Palamau Tiger Reserve.

Of the 1129.93 sq km area of Palamau Tiger Reserve, 414.08 sq km is marked as core area (critical tiger habitat) and the rest 715.85 sq km as a buffer area. Of the total area, 226.32 sq km is designated as Betla National Park. In the buffer zone, 53 sq km is marked as a tourist zone.

Palamau was declared a protected forest reserve in 1973-74 when Project Tiger was launched.

The reserve, according to information, recorded its highest tiger population in 1995 with 71 big cats but since then their population has been dwindling.

The Palamau Tiger Reserve consists mainly of Sal forests, mixed deciduous forests and bamboo groves. The reserve zone is the watershed area for three important rivers Koel, Burha and Auranga.

The Palamau Tiger Reserve was one of the first nine tiger reserves created in the country at inception of Project Tiger and has the distinction of being the first sanctuary in the world in which a tiger census was carried out based on pugmark count, as early as 1932 under the supervision of JW Nicholson, the then DFO, Palamau.

Apart from leopards, it boasts of elephants, grey wolf, gaur, sloth bear, four-horned antelope, Indian ratel, Indian otter and Indian pangolin among its inhabitants.

A total of 47 species of mammals and 174 species of birds have been identified, according to officials who said that apart from these, a total of 970 species of plants, 17 species of grass and 56 species of medicinal plants have also been identified.

Betla National Park under Latehar district of the state is located about 150 km from Ranchi and 25 km from Palamu headquarter Medininagar (Daltonganj).

The High Court of Jharkhand in September had come down heavily on the forest department for having failed to protect the flora and fauna in reserve forests of the state and a division bench of Chief Justice Dr Ravi Ranjan and Justice Sujit Narayan Prasad, while hearing a public interest litigation, observed that it is shameful to know that there are just five tigers in the wild in the state.

The forest officers do not seem to be worried about the scanty animal presence in the jungles and have not done anything to enhance the population of the wild animals, the bench had said.