Tigers of Central India

[Rishi]

(11-22-2018, 10:56 AM)Suhail Wrote: Another ultimate news about migrations and gene pool of tiger!
Scientists unravels the mystery of Lalgarh tiger, which had made the forests of Jhargram’s erstwhile
Maoist zone, West Midnapore and Bankura, its home for over two months this summer — had come from the forests of central India, an astonishing 900km away, and not Odisha’s Simlipal as was earlier thought, suggests DNA analysis.

*This image is copyright of its original author

The speculative journey of the big cat, a full-grown male, would make it one of the longest tiger migrations ever: over 1,000km, since it didn’t travel as the crow flies.

This has renewed hope about possible tiger-migration routes between central India and Bengal and underscores the need to protect forest corridors.
Read full:
https://m.timesofindia.com/city/kolkata/lalgarh-tiger-had-bandhavgarh-dna/articleshow/66743350.cms

(Long rant to follow. Took me months to gather everything)
Yes, reason the Lalgarh tiger made so much headlines was because how unexpectedly it surfaced, from Chhotanagpur Plateau, a part of Central India's former prime tiger landscape where tigers are now barely holding on. 

Some background first... During the "hunting era" this area was what the Kanha-Tadoba are today.
Also due to being in the limelight, the region's forests are populated by tribals who made their living off the hunting industry. After hunting was banned they took to poaching & by the '90s, most of wildlife population was decimated.

Then started the Maoist insurgency when most of this area fell under the Red corridor & almost went lawless. Right now most of it is still completely off the conservation grid & infrastructure haven't been properly rebuilt. The Palamau & Indravati tiger reserves haven't still been fully sanitised.

In Jharkhand, northern Odisha & Chhattisgarh, (15000 km² forest complex east of Sanjay-Dubri & Achanakmar tiger reserves) virtually nothing is known of those forests due to the complete absence of any formal wildlife research in this landscape for the last decade of unrest.

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(I've labeled the a Largarh town near which the tiger was lynched & marked the probable corridor with white.) 
Because of no presence of any big cats in the highly fragmented & human dominated forest cover, everybody was taken by surprise when a tiger was sighted here, later camera trapped.
Even the very existence of a viable tiger corridor upto West Bengal's Jangalmahal was not known, neither was a nearby tiger population other than Simlipal. 
But this male's features didn't match any known specimen of the database at Simlipal. So everyone wondered of its origin  (which unfortunately was only determined by genetic study after its demise).

*This image is copyright of its original author

The tiger was very efficient at surviving near people. During his 2-3 months stay, killed very few cattle (despite near non-existent preybase) & attacked nobody.

But the fact that turned heads was his age. He was a past-prime male, aged 10-12 years, not an adventurous youngster looking for home. That meant two things...

1. Either the male had been wandering around the forests of Chhotanagpur all his life.
   .
2. And/or, there's one or more small unidentified tiger breeding populations hidden from us.
   

The fact that he carried Bandhavgarh-Sanjay genes are not in disagreement with that. Palamau is fairly well connected to the west & some of whatever few tigers remain in Palamau, are from there. 
Although in the map i marked the whole length as a corridor, there are 4 protected areas (varying quality of management) between them, where tiger estimations show sparse presence of tigers.

He need not have come all the way from MP, but somewhere from Saranda forests (marked in map), or kicked out of Palamau, or be a wanderer as well.

This is not the first time mystery tigers popped up in the region out of nowhere!
For example, in 2016 a tigress was sighted by tourists in the tiny Dalma Hills Wildlife Sanctuary, more then 50 years after being declared locally extinct. 
There's a footage:

As per reports from locals, she found herself a mate & had cubs. Then suddenly, signs suggested that the tigers had moved towards the huge Saranda landscape southwest of Dalma, where a tiger stumbled into a iron-ore mine in 2011.
Tigers were sighted in 2014-15 in the forests near of Ranchi city, north of Saranda.
A tiger was detected & poached in Debrigarh Wildlife Sanctuary of Odisha a last month.

*This image is copyright of its original author

Another was sighted this week! The national census detected them in 3 new places of northern Odisha.

The most likely place to house a viable stronghold is the Saranda forests, due to its size & relatively less fragmentation. Had the "Lalgarh tiger" headed South instead of East, then he'd have reached Simlipal instead of hitting a dead end (literally).
But the landscape is mineral rich & the lobby-driven super-corrupt local authorities are destroying it. The same reason those areas became guerrilla hotbeds in the first place... Reply