Uttarakhand: Rajaji reserve officials look for missing tigress

A 20-year-old tigress has not been camera trapped for over four months at Uttarakhand’s Rajaji Tiger Reserve even as a tiger translocation process is underway there to repopulate the reserve’s western part. The state forest department in November deployed four teams on elephants to search the missing tigress.

Puneet Tomar, the reserve’s deputy director, said the western part had two adult tigresses before a four-year-old radio-collared tigress was shifted there last week from the Corbett National Park. The radio-collared tigress’s locations can be traced. Tomar said the forest department is yet to confirm the location of one of the older tigresses.

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Tomar said they are working with nearby forest divisions of Dehradun and Haridwar as well as combing the Rajaji Tiger Reserve to trace the tigress. “We have fresh pug marks and scats samples. So, one tigress is definitely there. We are just waiting for reports to confirm the presence of the other tigress. We have already placed camera traps, and are conducting search operations to find the missing tigress.”

The Rajaji reserve has 34 resident tigers, including 32 in its eastern part, as per the recent estimation. The reserve’s eastern and western parts are divided by a busy traffic corridor that makes it difficult for the tigers to move between the two parts. The western part had only two tigresses till last week, which has not reported bred in over a decade.