A week-long tiger census campaign began in Corbett Tiger Reserve and all five forest divisions in the Terai landscape from Monday.
As a precursor to the main state-of-the-art technology assisted tiger census exercise which would be held in second phase later, this is rather a manual effort in which foresters of the respective forest divisions would identify the tiger dominated areas across the Himalayan State through tiger’s movements and direct or indirect sighting. Besides, the foresters deployed to carry out this task would also maintain a special vigil along the transit lines in different forest divisions to trace tiger movements. At the same time, they would also depend on the pugmarks to estimate presence of the tiger in different forest zones.
Thus the reports and data collected during this weeklong tiger census campaign will form the basis for studying presence of tigers in different forest zones, said Vivek Pandey, Conservator of Forest (CF), western circle, while talking to The Pioneer. Accordingly, camera traps will be placed in these forest zones or possible areas identified after this weeklong tiger census drive , added the CF, western circle.
The State forest department may also tie up with some other agencies having expertise in wildlife for installing the camera traps for capturing tigers in second round of survey. It may be recalled that in a bid to make this weeklong tiger census campaign error free, the State forest department also conducted training programmes for foresters ranging from Divisional Forest Officers to lower ranking officials.
Therefore, there should not be any problem in carrying out this important task of tiger census and all the forest officials concerned deployed in this campaign have been instructed to carry out the task properly, added the senior forest officials. It is worth mention here that the Terai landscape comprising the Terai- east forest division, Terai-west forest division, Terai-central forest forest division, Haldwani forest division, Ramnagar forest division and Corbett Tiger Reserve has been critical tiger habitat. Its rich flora and fauna has only made this Terai landscape a favourable habitat for the big cat in the Himalayan State.