A three-year-old tigress, BTR TF-1, known locally as Duarsrani, dug her way out of an enclosure in West Bengal's Buxa Tiger Reserve on Sunday. By Monday evening there was no sign of her turning back; as before, she was moving east towards Assam's Raimona Tiger Reserve. Having crossed the Bala river, Jayanti village and the Jayanti river, she is now in dense forest near the Chunia tower in Panbari beat, the forest department says, Kolkata's Ei Samay reports.
The tigress was brought to Buxa from Bihar's Valmiki Tiger Reserve under a tiger reintroduction project. She was healthy when darted on 29 September. After a second reversal antidote at the Gorakhpur air base she became aggressive in her cage. When she was radio-collared in the Buxa enclosure on 1 October, all the claws on both front paws were found injured, several broken, and her nose was wounded.
Citing sources in India's environment ministry, the paper says that at a review meeting in Delhi on 15 October, Rajesh Gopal, secretary general of the Global Tiger Forum and a member of the Buxa expert committee, asked why she had been released into the open forest on 2 October with such injuries. The meeting concluded she should not have been freed before the wounds healed. According to the report, the experts recommended that future tigers come not from Valmiki but from nearer forests such as Manas or Kaziranga in Assam.
She crossed out of Buxa into Assam on 23 October and was darted and brought back on 3 November. Inspecting the enclosure, officials found she had tried to tunnel out at no fewer than 16 places despite her injured claws, finally escaping through soft soil beside the gate.
On Monday the number of forest staff guarding and tracking her was raised from 60 to 150, with three trained kunki elephants. Her high-frequency radio collar logs her position every hour, ground monitoring continues and Assam has been informed. The state forest minister said she had to be released within 10 days under National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) instructions, and officials would try to keep her in Buxa.
The report is by Shiladitya Saha and Aishwarya Mitra of Ei Samay.
Photo: Sandipoutsider / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Source: Ei Samay
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