Around 90 elephants continue to hide in the forests of Mayurbhanj for the last 10 days, in spite of the best efforts of the Forest Department to chase them away from the district. It was in the intervening night of November 19 and 20 that a herd of elephants came here from the West Bengal forests.
The elephants on Tuesday night crossed over to the Durgapur forests under Betnoti Forest Range from the nearby Asanbani forests under Rasgovindpur Forest Range. During day-time, the elephants prefer to stay confined to the forests and choose to roam out at night, damaging the crops. Meanwhile, methods like solar fencing, digging of trenches and showing burning flames, have been adopted to chase the pachyderms away, said Forest Range Officers of Rasgovindpur and Betnoti, Dillip Kumar Barik and Saroj Kumar Mohanty, respectively.
On Tuesday night, 10 vehicles carrying about 100 Forest staffers were deployed in the area to prevent the jumbos from damaging the crops, informed Mohanty. But sometimes crowd-management is posing a greater challenge than the task of elephant-management itself, he said.
This is so, as sometimes angry mobs, instead of extending cooperation to the Forest staff, rebuke them and obstruct their work knowingly or unknowingly, he added.