2 Dec 2019



In what may be the longest trek by a tiger in India, a sub-adult of the species reached Dnyanganga Wildlife Sanctuary in Buldhana district of Maharashtra on Sunday, walking 1,300 km over six months, from Tipeshwar Wildlife Sanctuary in Yavatmal district.

What intrigues conservationists is that T1C1 appears to not have stopped anywhere for more than four-five days, and that too only when he made a kill, mostly of cattle. Maharashtra Chief Wildlife Warden Nitin Kakodkar said the tiger didn’t travel in a linear fashion but moved back and fourth several times, over farmlands, water bodies and highways, thus adding hundreds of kilometres to its journey.

While experts think the pattern shows search for a mate, they believe it also indicates that the tiger protection policy needs to be recalibrated.

Wildlife scientists and managers generally follow the popular “source and sink” population theory of a decade ago — it was believed that beyond the protected core tiger areas or source populations, a dispersing tiger population was bound to be a “sink” population, or not guaranteed to survive.

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