The Saturday story | In pursuit of a tiger

Pavan Kumar H

. I was headed to the Nagarhole Tiger Reserve in a cab. My plan was to join a group of forest officials who were attempting to track a male tiger. The predator had killed a seven-year-old boy on the fringes of the forest. At 6.30 am, when we were about 20 km from the Kallahatti checkpost, a ping on my phone woke me up. It was a photo message on WhatsApp from a forester from the Metikuppe range. It conveyed that they had captured the tiger the previous evening.

. Nearly 150 forest staff were in hot pursuit of the tiger for 15 days. I was happy for them but a bit disappointed as a journalist. I had travelled nearly 500 km from Hubballi via Mysuru for the assignment only to learn I was 12 hours late!

. I called the forest guard who had sent me the message. His voice was bubbling with energy and satisfaction. “We caught it last evening, sir. We could not inform you earlier due to poor mobile network. The tiger has been shifted to an undisclosed location,” he updated me before going on to suggest I speak to Dr Ramesha H and sharpshooter Ranjan Kannadaa. They were responsible for darting the tiger, he said.

. I reached the checkpost at 8 am and waited there as Dr Ramesha had instructed. He is a senior veterinary surgeon of Nagarhole. I could tell from a distance that some forest personnel from the tiger tracking operation were enjoying a breakfast of chow-chow bath and tomato bath. They looked relieved. At 11.30 am, Dr Ramesha came to meet me only to share, “No one is allowed to see the captured tiger. Sorry.”

. “Can you describe the operation?” I said, pressing for an interview. “We will speak over the phone,” he replied and left. He was visibly exhausted.

. Behind the scenes

. We reconnected five days later. “Natural light was fading quickly. We were sitting in a jeep, camouflaged with leaves and branches, 30 metres from the carcass of a cow that the tiger had killed that afternoon. I knew the tiger would come back at dusk to claim its prize,” Dr Ramesha began, adding that they had a short window to tranquilise the tiger.

. His six-year experience of working with tigers kicked in. Around 6.15 pm, the eight-year-old “hulk of a male tiger” walked out of thick bushes in silence. Dr Ramesha and sharpshooter Ranjan followed the tiger’s movement on their night vision devices and thermal glasses. The tiger was about to feast on the cow.

. “On the near-silent count of three, I flashed the torch on the tiger and Ranjan simultaneously fired the dart right at its left shoulder. It hit the bulls-eye,” Dr Ramesha continued. The tiger did not charge at them. It instead ran into the bushes after growling at them.

. They sat still in the jeep, waiting for the medicine to work on the tiger, which weighed nearly 180 kilos. The right dose of the drug at the right spot can put a tiger in a temporary sleep-like state in six to eight minutes.

. Four teams posted a kilometre from the jeep rushed to the spot on Dr Ramesha’s command. Then Dr Ramesha and others climbed one of the elephants deployed for the search to comb the bushes. When they found the tiger, it was lying sedated on a dried stream bed, 100 metres from where it was shot. Its breathing had come down from the usual 45 breaths per minute to 20.

. Using a long stick, the team poked at the tiger’s tail and ears. When the big cat did not respond, they blindfolded it with a cloth and shifted it to a cage. A quick check of his claws and teeth was done to assess if it was injured, sick or too old.

. The team heaved a sigh of relief when the tiger regained consciousness in the cage. Sixty-five minutes had lapsed since they spotted the tiger, and 15 days since they began scanning 900 hectares of the forest and fringe land.

. However, their joy was short-lived. Residents of the Kallahatti village where the boy had been killed started murmuring that the forest department had captured the wrong tiger!

. Mistaken identities?

. The officials took me to Kallahatti, a hamlet of farming families. Krishna Nayak, the father of the deceased boy, was sitting on a stone, staring blankly at his field. His wife and daughter hadn’t stepped out since the tragedy. Fearing the tiger was on the prowl, many villagers were also staying indoors.

. I met Linga Nayak, an elderly man. He claimed the boy was attacked by a smaller tiger. The boy’s body had grave injuries but the flesh was mostly intact. The captured tiger was huge and had it gone for the boy, it would have devoured him in minutes, leaving behind no trace of him.

. The villagers had seen both the tigers near the fields and could tell one from the other, he told me. “Though both used to prey on our cattle, they had never killed a human before. This is serious. One of the tigers in the area has now tasted human blood and it could turn into a man-eater,” Linga said, voicing his concerns.

. Tigers are shy by nature and human flesh is not a part of their natural diet. They become man-eaters due to one of three reasons — when their prey base depletes, if they are old or incapacitated to go hunting or when they lose their fear of humans. Man-eating tigers are different from tigers who attack or kill humans in self-defence.

. Harshith K N, range forest officer (RFO) of Metikuppe, told me this was a case of accidental killing and that the tiger was not a man-eater. DNA profiling will ascertain its identity, the RFO informed me, his eyes red from sleeplessness and infection. He was co-ordinating with different teams and taking care of their food, water and accommodation in the dense jungle all through the operation.

. According to Harshith, the tiger mistook the boy for a small animal. On September 4, Charan, the boy, was sitting crouched on a bag of freshly harvested chillies, kept 400 metres from his family’s field and a stone’s throw from the forest boundary. His eyes were glued to a mobile phone. The tall cotton plants in the field provided sufficient cover for the tiger to ambush the boy from behind. “I was plucking chillies in my field when I heard my son’s cry. Appa, he cried. By the time I reached the bag, my son wasn’t there,” a distraught Krishna recalled. A frenetic search with neighbours led him to his lifeless child. The tiger had pressed its long canines into the eye sockets and neck of the child and ripped out his right thigh.

. “The tiger had not eaten the boy’s leg. This indicates the tiger is not a man-eater,” said assistant conservator of forests, K N Rangaswamy.

. Back to the op

. The forest officials were confident of their analysis but in matters of human-animal conflict, they don’t take a chance. Plus, the villagers were raging. Any delay in action against the ‘killer’ tiger could have resulted in the villagers taking matters into their own hands and harming ‘innocent’ tigers. The Kallahatti village falls between the buffer zones of Metikuppe and Veeranahosahalli range. Three adult tigers cross the village to reach other parts of the Nagarhole forest often.

. Amid the hue and cry, the forest department put together a team of 150 foot soldiers, drawing them from the elephant task force, the tiger task force, the leopard task force, and forest guards and watchers from neighbouring ranges.

. Members of the Jenu Kuruba tribe who are known for detecting wild animals through smell were also enlisted. The services of Arjuna, Ashwathama, and Bhima were sought. These are Mysuru Dasara elephants. Their training for the upcoming procession had to be pushed so they could help with tiger tracking.

. During the day, the forest personnel combed potential areas and gathered information in teams. At night, they flew three drones to survey the jungle. Sixty camera traps were fixed and 12 large cages set up with bait such as goats, calf, and other meat. However, the tiger was two steps ahead of the foresters. Not only did it dodge the traps, but it also killed two cows within two kilometres of the search radius.

. RFO Harshith told me they had tracked down the tiger using camera trap pictures and by matching pugmarks found at the crime site with the database of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and their local database. The mahouts had a somewhat different story to share. “We were telling the officials to make an ‘offering’ to Kaada Devi (forest goddess) and our ancestors. They did not listen to us. On the 14th day, the tribal people prayed to the god and promised to offer ‘prasada’ if the tiger was captured within two days. Our belief turned out right,” Arjuna’s mahout Jaybala said.

. As per the unofficial estimate, the department spent nearly Rs 22 lakh on the mission, including a Rs 15 lakh-compensation for the victim’s family.

. Tagging along

. At the time of going to print, forensic tests to ascertain the identity of the captured tiger were on and forest officials were looking for the tiger the villagers hold guilty. And so, when I arrived at Nagarhole that day, I still got a chance to go to the heart of the jungle with a search team. They were armed with machetes, sticks, ropes, binoculars and a pump gun.

. Since wild animals often move along the streams, we started our search at one. We sighted a lot of footprints or scats but none belonged to the big four (tiger, leopard, elephant, and bear). The call of langurs, monkeys, and deer can hint at the presence of tigers. However, that day, there was eerie silence. The trees were so still that even the cool breeze spooked me. The rustling of branches above my head and crunch of grass under my feet made it worse. Coppersmith barbets, red-vented bulbuls, and golden orioles checked on us regularly, offering some respite from the tension.

. We took a right turn from the stream and walked 500 metres to the point where a ‘Tumakuru cage’ was set up. There was nothing inside. The huge cage is named after the district of Tumakuru where it is widely used to capture leopards.

. After patrolling for nearly 4 km for an hour and 45 minutes, we halted at an anti-poaching camp.

. Tracking, then and now

. Over a cup of tea made from lemongrass and jaggery, the foresters told me about the complexities of their job. Dinesh J B recalled an incident from 12 years ago when a tiger had pounced on a colleague. He had assumed it was sedated. Luckily, the guard was holding a net against his body and he got away with a broken arm and scars on his chest.

. Another officer told me about a 2014 case. A man-eating tiger who had mauled two labourers in a coffee estate in Chikkamagaluru was released into the heart of the Bhimgad Wildlife Sanctuary, in Belagavi district. Locals opposed the move. The tiger went on to kill a tribal woman soon after, forcing the department to shoot down the beast. A wrong decision had claimed the life of both a human and an animal, he lamented. Then in 2017, a female tiger from the H D Kote range of Nagarhole died hours into captivity because of excess dosage of an anaesthetic.

. Vaseem Mirza, a veterinarian at Bandipur National Park, is batting for the use of technology for rescuing and rehabilitating animals in conflict. More efficient tranquiliser drugs, long-range darting guns, and safety equipment to minimise animal and rescuer casualty are some good practices deployed in South Africa, he explained.

. The change has set in. Dinesh said, “Today, tranquilising guns, advanced cages, and camera traps have made the operations less risky.” Earlier, experts would sit on elephants and chase the rogue animal until it fell into a large pit. It is called the ‘Kedda method’.

. Senior forest guard Srinivas pointed out a conundrum they are facing. On the one hand, Karnataka’s conservation efforts have boosted the tiger population. On the other hand, our forests have shrunk due to encroachment and deforestation. This is bringing tigers and other wildlife into greater contact with human settlements.

. “In every conflict where human life is lost, there is extreme pressure on the forest department to remove the animal from its territory,” said Dr Prayag H S, chief veterinary officer and forensic expert. He, however, concedes that poor knowledge of crime scene investigation and forensic analysis is leading to the capture of innocent animals.

. Was the tiger captured from Metikuppe innocent? It has been shifted to the Shivamogga Zoo and, tragically, it broke two of its four canines in transit. Tigers with missing canines often turn into human hunters as they find it difficult to go after their natural prey, wildlife activists say.

. The tiger’s fate is now in the hands of the principal chief conservator of forests (wildlife). It will remain in the zoo if found guilty of killing the boy or it will be released back into the forest if science proves his innocence. DH will keep you updated.

. Like this story? Email: dhonsat@deccanherald.co.in

. FACT FILE

. Nagarhole Tiger Reserve, about 218 km from Bengaluru, has the second-highest tiger population in India. From an estimated 72 tigers in 2015, it is now home to 149 adult tigers. Metikuppe is part of Nagarhole and has 18 tigers, including three adult tigers (1 female and 2 male) in its buffer zone.

The Saturday story | In pursuit of a tiger

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