The tigress moved from Bihar to West Bengal's Buxa Tiger Reserve has suffered a miscarriage, the Kolkata daily Ei Samay reported, citing West Bengal forest department sources. The roughly three-year-old animal, brought from Bihar's Valmiki Tiger Reserve, miscarried in her Buxa enclosure on 7 November. A veterinarian found that three foetuses of about two months had been lost; they have been preserved at Buxa.
The next afternoon, 8 November, the tigress, tagged BTR TF-1, left the enclosure for the open forest. The state forest minister had said she dug a tunnel out, but several sources in the forest department say she slipped through a gap in the enclosure's metal mesh. On 9 November a senior state forest official set up a special committee to investigate. On Thursday Sanjayan Kumar, an inspector general of the National Tiger Conservation Authority, and its member secretary Sanjay Pathak arrived at Buxa.
According to the report, the tigress was tranquillised three times in about a month: when she was caught in Valmiki on 29 September, when she was darted again in the Buxa enclosure on 1 October to fit a radio collar, and on 3 November, when she was taken from a thicket beside the Lousa river at Gelaguri, south of Assam's Raimona forest, and brought back. She had crossed into the Raimona area on 21 October. On 3 November forest staff used four kunki elephants and several earth movers to hem her in through the day.
Experts are asking why the pregnancy was not spotted. Ei Samay says no ultrasound test was done when she was chosen, and the selection rested on visual confirmation alone. Eighteen hours passed between her darting in Valmiki and her release into the Buxa enclosure, almost all of it in an iron cage, during which she injured herself while agitated by the reversal antidote and pulled off her radio collar. On 3 November, the paper says, the antidote was not given promptly because a crowd had gathered.
Prabeshwar Basumatary, who works in wildlife conservation in Assam's Kokrajhar, told the paper that forest villagers repeatedly told him the tigress was pregnant and that her behaviour made it plain. "I told the forest officers of Assam and Bengal more than once. But none of them listened to the villagers," he said. Gaurav Ojha, field director of Valmiki Tiger Reserve, said nobody had told him anything about the miscarriage. Sonali Ghosh, Assam's additional principal chief conservator of forests, did not answer her phone.
Some wildlife experts believe the two-month-pregnant tigress could not bear the strain of adjusting to new ground, repeated tranquillisers and antidotes, and being constantly followed in the name of monitoring; the miscarriage came four days after she was returned to Buxa. About 150 forest workers and six kunki elephants are now tracking her to keep her from entering Assam again.
The state forest minister said on Thursday afternoon that "Duars Rani", as the tigress is called, was well. He later said: "I am not denying responsibility. But we brought her on Bihar's fitness certificate. It is being investigated from every angle." The move is West Bengal's first tiger reintroduction. The report was written by Shiladitya Saha and Saheli Biswas.
Photo: Kaustav Dutta / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Source: Ei Samay
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