Tiger treks 280 km in search of own territory

Amit Bhattacharya, TNN | May 15, 2011,

NEW DELHI: A young male tiger, wandering through Karnataka's forests in search of a patch to call its own, has achieved a feat that will put it in the record books. In 15 months, the tiger travelled 280km as the crow flies, more than the straight-line distance between Delhi and Shimla, the longest documented distance traversed by a tiger anywhere in the world.

This came to light after a tiger was caught in Gama village near Shikaripur town of Karnataka's Shimoga district on May 1. It had strayed into a betelnut plantation and was stoned by a mob. The cornered tiger attacked and killed a man before it was tranquilized by forest officials.

On May 7, at an event watched by Union environment minister Jairam Ramesh, the tiger was released in the Bhadra Wildlife Sanctuary. Photographs taken during the tiger's release were analysed by scientists of the Centre for Wildlife Studies, a wildlife NGO which has been camera-trapping in Karnataka's forests for around two decades.

 "Photo-matching with our database, the animal was reliably identified as male tiger BPT-241, last camera-trapped in Gundre, Bandipur Tiger Reserve, on February 11 and February 18, 2010," said Dr K Ullas Karanth, head of CWS India.

 "A GIS map showed that the straight line distance moved by this tiger since its photo-capture from Bandipur to Shikaripur is about 280km. The actual distance travelled by it would be more than 350km," Karanth said.

Looking at the map, one could say the tiger would have generally moved through forest patches but would also have traversed through coffee plantations, he added.

Karanth said though young male tigers were known to travel long distances to establish their territory, this is the longest dispersal documented through camera-trapping or radio-telemetry.

 In 2006, a young male tiger, BDT-130, was camera trapped in Bhadra forests and then again in Dandeli in 2008. The straight line dispersal in that case was 197km. A radio-collared tiger in Russia was found to have travelled 195km.

Late last year, a young male tiger created a scare among villagers near Mathura in western UP, which experts at the Wildlife Institute of India said, had come from Ranthambore. The tiger then made its way to the Bharatpur bird sanctuary, from where it was relocated to Sariska.

"We have not seen any documentary evidence of the distance travelled by that tiger," said Karanth. " WII has been running a camera-trapping project in Ranthambore for the past five years. If there is proof that this tiger came from there, the evidence should be made public,"Karanth added.

Meanwhile, more camera traps have been placed in Bhadra to track the fate of BPT-241. Like all tigers, he will have to compete with other males to establish his territory, Karanth said.