Potential second home in making : Gir lion crosses into Barda Wildlife Sanctuary after 143 yrs

“This is an important development as the forest department had been preparing Barda as a potential lion habitat for a very long time. A breeding centre of spotted deer is functioning there and now, there is a sufficient prey base for lions in that forest.”

Local forest officers said the lion, which is around three-and-a-half years old, was tagged with a radio transmitter in October last year. “This male lion is part of the coastal population near Mangrol in Junagadh. We tagged it after it started venturing into new territories,” said an officer.

Rajya Sabha Member Parimal Nathwani, who is also a member of the advisory committee for Gir National Park and Sanctuary (GNPS), termed the development “phenomenal.” “Asiatic lion, the pride of Gujarat and India, has found a new and a second home in Barda Wildlife Sanctuary. The lion’s last presence in Barda was recorded way back in 1879 AD,” he said in an official release.

Historically, the habitat of lions in India extended to much of central and northern parts of the country. However, hunting and habitat loss meant that their presence was limited only to the Gir forest by the turn of the 20th century.

In 2013, the Supreme Court had ordered translocation of the lions to Kuno-Palpur in Madhya Pradesh to give the endangered species a second home. However, not a single big cat has been moved to that state as the Gujarat government has been insisting that some studies suggested by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) be first conducted in Kuno.

It also claimed that lions were naturally dispersing from the Gir forest. Amid the standoff, eight African cheetahs were brought to Kuno in September last year as part of a project to introduce and establish a population of the wild cats in that sanctuary.

The lions started dispersing from GNPS in the early 1990s by moving towards the east along the banks of River Shetrunji. Later on, they established territories along the coastal parts of Amreli, Bhavnagar, Gir Somnath, Amreli and Porbandar districts. The lion population was estimated to be 674 in 2020 and more than half of them were found to have settled outside protected forest areas.

As part of its lion conservation efforts, the state forest department opened a lion gene pool centre at BWLS. That facility inside the sanctuary has some lions in captive condition. But this is for the first time in decades that a lion has moved into the sanctuary on its own, officials said.

Nathwani, who is also the director (corporate affairs) of Reliance Industries Limited, expressed hope that the state and Central governments would continue to facilitate natural dispersal of lions.