Tigers facing ‘density related deaths’: 72 died in India till July this year

The meeting was attended by NTCA regional office Inspector General Debrata Swain, Principal Chief Conservator of Forest (Maharashtra) Shri Bhagwan, Field Directors of all tiger reserves in the forest states and divisional level officials of non-protected areas.

Sources told The Indian Express that the discussions focused on worrisome increase in tiger mortality in the current year. Till July, the country has seen deaths of 72 tigers, of which 29 were in these four states. While MP had the highest mortality of 20, Maharashtra followed with eight and Chhattisgarh with one. Odisha recorded no tiger death.

With five more months still to go this year, 2016 may perhaps register the highest number of tiger deaths if the trend continues. The tallies for the previous five years beginning 2011 were 56, 82, 68, 78 and 78.

“Of 29 deaths in the four states in Friday’s conference, as many as 22 deaths were recorded inside Project Tiger (PT) areas while five cases were from outside the protected areas. One case was of skin seizure. Thus, the trend is of majority deaths in PT areas, which has been noticed in other high-density PT areas of the country as well,” said a senior official.

Giving details, the official said, “with tiger density on the rise in many PT areas, there are increasing number of territorial fight fatality cases. Also, many young and weak old tigers get knocked out to non-protected fringes, where they come in clash with local populations, often succumbing to retaliation by humans. Male tigers often kill cubs to force the tigers to mate or even kill an unwilling tigress with cubs. Sometimes tigers are also found to have died after consuming herbivore carcasses poisoned by aggrieved farmers.”

According to the official, this trend of density related mortality has been on the rise in PT areas like Tadoba, Pench, Bandhaogarh, Kanha and Jim Corbett. “One of the most interesting trends coming to fore of late is of tigresses weaning (deserting) their cubs within 18 months as against their normal rearing period of 30 months, mainly due to mating pressure from male tigers. The tigresses also are found to be staging fake mating to save their cubs from the male,” the official further said.

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The NTCA officials directed the four states to send all documents detailing reasons of deaths related to pending 68 cases of tiger deaths in the post 2012 period within the next 10 days. “The reasons for pendency were stated to be late arrivals of forensic or pathological reports, pendency in courts and difficulty in tracking the cases due to transfers of ground-level staff,” the official said.