Tigress flown from Bihar gets a hard release in Buxa as prey and protection improve

A tigress brought from Bihar to Buxa Tiger Reserve in India's West Bengal has been given direct access to the open forest instead of months in an enclosure, Ei Samay reports. Flown in from Valmiki Tiger Reserve early on Wednesday, she had the way from a newly built 2.2-hectare enclosure into the forest opened on Friday, what reintroduction specialists call a "hard release". As of Saturday evening, she was still in the enclosure.

The state forest department had first said she would spend a few months in the enclosure before release, a "soft release". Qamar Qureshi, a senior scientist on the Valmiki-to-Buxa project, the state's first tiger reintroduction, said soft releases were used at Sariska in Rajasthan, India's first reintroduction in 2008, and at Panna, because everyone was still learning; across about 13 reintroductions in the decade and a half since, it has become clear that a hard release works where the two forests match ecologically and there is enough prey and protection.

Prey density and overall security in Buxa have improved, Qureshi said, so the tigress was hard-released in stages. The enclosure still matters: future tigers will be kept there, and this tigress will return to it for a few days if illness or a radio-collar problem means she has to be brought back.

According to the report, the roughly three-year-old tigress hunted mainly wild boar in Valmiki and never killed livestock; she was darted when she returned to a calf left as bait. Valmiki Tiger Reserve field director Gaurav Ojha said her home range there was roughly 25-35 square kilometres, she never killed outside the forest, and the two forests are similar in character.

Buxa has many leopards; asked about conflict, Ojha said a tiger's arrival worries the leopards, which avoid a tiger's territory. To monitor the tigress, let her settle on her own terms and avoid early conflict with people, a ban on tourism in and around Buxa has been extended from 3 October to 9 October.

Photo: Luis Miguel Bugallo Sánchez (Lmbuga) / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Source: Ei Samay