Trail of the tiger

leading the way

Just a few hours away from the busy city of Bengaluru is a Malenad landscape, spread over 30,000 sq km, that houses 400 tigers. Covering five tiger reserves across the state, the landscape has possibly the highest population of wild tigers in the world. It is a global biodiversity hotspot, with the charismatic tigers representing just a ‘tip of the iceberg’.

The landscape harbours thousands of wild plants and animals – several endangered, many endemic, and conserved under the shadows of this majestic striped predator. But just about half a century ago, the situation here was quite different. K Ullas Karanth, a renowned authority on tigers, recalls, “When I was a teenager growing up here, there were perhaps less than 50 tigers. In 1960s, things looked bleak for the tiger due to poaching and land clearance activities across the country. I had lost all hope for the future of wildlife in India.”

The turnaround for the fate of tigers in India, with global implications considering that India has more than half of the world’s population, came about in the 1970s. With strong political will, backed by India’s pioneer conservationists, the decade saw the launch of Project Tiger, and promulgation of the Indian Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, to conserve tigers. These initiatives formed the much-needed pillars for tiger conservation in the country.

As these progresses were made at the national level, a revolution of sorts was brewing in Karnataka, which would subsequently set a global benchmark in various aspects of tiger conservation.

Inspired by the pioneering work of wildlife biologist Dr. George Schaller of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), Ullas Karanth began studying tigers of the Malenad landscape.

The biggest challenge then was counting these secretive big cats. The world had until then relied on the ‘pugmark’ method to estimate tiger population. This involved counting and comparing tiger pugmarks in forests, resting on assumption that individual tigers can be identified based on their pugmarks. The method had its drawbacks, and gave a misleading estimate of tiger numbers. Pugmarks of one tiger could easily be attributed to many tigers.

Capturing cats on film
Informed conservation action needed accurate baseline information on tiger numbers, especially considering the increasing threats from poaching for tiger parts that emerged in the 1990s. It was then, countering the pugmark method that was prevalent for nearly two decades, Ullas introduced the camera-trapping technique for a reliable counting of tigers. Camera-trapping, as a method to document wildlife, was not new. Its use is recorded as early as the 1920s. However, the innovative twist to use this to estimate tiger population was just about being invented in Karnataka. This was a simple enough method, yet accurate in the information it yielded. It relies on the fact that every tiger is unique and identifiable through its stripes – just like fingerprints in humans.

The automated cameras were first deployed in Nagarahole. Triggered by the passing tigers themselves, the cameras clicked pictures of the elusive cats. Using the images collected over time, individual tigers were identified. Using advanced statistical models, it was possible to estimate tiger numbers realistically, including those that were missed by the camera traps. This method is now known as photographic capture-recapture
sampling, and is being used to estimate tigers globally today. With this, Karnataka had shown the way to the world to count tigers.

Since those initial years, Karnataka has come a long way in tiger conservation.
Today, in close collaboration with the Karnataka State Forest Department, WCS
operates the longest-running intensive research on tigers and their prey in the world. The result is an extensive database holding records of around 800 individual tigers and as many individual leopards that have thrived here over the past 30 years.

Every year, a team of WCS researchers, technicians and young tribal assistants place camera traps in over 700 locations, recording tigers and other wildlife in the Malenad landscape, to add to this database. Last season, the researchers documented around 250 individual tigers and over 300 individual leopards.

This detailed documentation has enabled scientists to recreate life histories of these tigers – like pieces of a puzzle, with photographs taken in subsequent years giving chronological insight into their lives.

There are many uses of this photo database apart from the insight on tiger populations. The database has helped identify individual tigers involved in conflicts with people, for management of such conflict animals, for instance. It has also helped trace tiger skins recovered from illegal traders to the source, and thereby aiding the legal recourse. All of these emerged and continue to be sustained, right here in our backyard, making Karnataka a bread-basket of global tiger conservation. A 6-8 fold increase in wild tiger population in just over five decades to hold 10 per cent of global tiger population currently, just shows that the basket is being gradually but steadily filled.

Now, with increasing involvement of general public, Karnataka is paving newer paths in wildlife conservation – overcoming challenges, capitalising on opportunities, and ensuring a better future for tigers and other wildlife.