One of three males I saw this morning. So much for previously posted nonchalance! We watched this young male on the road briefly before following him as he headed down a drying up nala towards water. A Langur family group was drinking at the pool as my driver Bafati adroitly positioned us at the ideal viewpoint. The Langur scattered and shot up the trees hurling the characteristic and abusive sounding alarm calls as the tiger padded down to the pool. Looking closely he has a wound on his left fore leg ; which looks like claw marks, presumably from a fight with another tiger. Young males have a hard life, having to disperse from the maternal territory and carve out a new territory. Dominant males will not usually tolerate another male in their territory, which inevitably means conflict either between tigers or with human beings when the young males disperse.
I’ve seen official figures in the park literature of between 73-106 tigers (excluding cubs) in the whole park area (around 2000 sq km, if buffer areas are included) , but that figure is almost certainly wrong. It is based on the 2006 census that used the now discredited pug mark method. Here’s what Ullas Karanath who is probably the world’s leading expert on tigers has to say about that method; ‘ The pugmark census’ was invented in 1966 by Indian forester S.R.Choudhury…it fails to attain its unrealistic goal of measuring the absolute abundance of tigers, on a contry wide basis and because of this three decades of tiger monitoring has basically failed in India, despite being backed by massive investments and the best of intentions’ . (my emphasis). This is from a terrific article (Science deficiency in Conservation Practice , in an even better book by Karanath – The Science of Saving Tigers. I’m grateful to Aditya ‘Dicky’ Singh for directing me to Karanath’s work. Dicky’s excellent blog is at http://www.dickysingh.com/ .
The guides and locals that I’ve spoken to suggest 50 as a more realistic figure. The official park figures for prey animals at Kanha don’t quite add up to the numbers required to sustain the larger end of the estimate (106). The Museum suggests the following figures for 2010;
- Chital -26615
- Sambar – 3511
- Barasingha – 475
- Muntjac – 1174
- Nilgai – 102
- Chousingha – 146
- Gaur – 1690
- Wild Boar – 8157
Total = 41,870.
Given that the basic biology of an adult tiger means that it needs to kill and eat 50-60 cow or deer sized animals a year to survive, this in turn means that it needs a prey base of 500 animals. Again I’m relying on Ullas Karanath again here for these figures (this time Reconciling conservation with emancipatory politics, in The Science of saving Tigers). In theory that prey base assuming it is accurate and nothing goes wrong could support 83 tigers. The shortfall is presumably made up in domestic animals who are relatively easy prey. I’ve heard figures suggesting that tigers are successful on 2-4 out of 10 hunting attacks which statistic doesn’t include domestic prey. The hunting of domestic prey is a major source of community and tiger conflict. This is an age-old battle that goes back at least to the emergence of agriculture in the Near East although it is fascinating to speculate about the relationship between large carnivores and early hominds. Last time I checked Man the Hunter had been replaced by Man the Scavenger – a slightly less noble phrase. Biblical and Classical references to Lions (all those wonderful extended lion similes in the Illiad but that is a subject for another post ! ) were made by a people who had direct empirical knowledge of the cat and one theory about the near extermination of the Asiatic Lion is that its preferred habitat and hunting strategy was in direct competition with pastoralists. The Tiger, of course is an ambush predator particularly of deer although it will eat most animal prey, and is associated with forests, specifically forest edges. In evolutionary terms it emerged to prey on the deer as they spread out across Asia, from an ancestral homeland somewhere in Asia, in modern day China.Studies of the heartbreakingly recently extinct subspecies of tiger such as the Caspian (1972?) and Javan (1976) suggest that it was the reduction of prey animals that finished them off. There is something unbelievably poignant in the fact that they didn’t quite make it to the 21st century, particularly given that the science now is good enough now to understand why.
And before I sign off with a haunting image of the last of these magnificent cats dying of hunger somewhere in an empty thicket on the Turkmen-Uzbek-Afghan border or deer forest in Java, here is another image from today.
Note the distinctive markings – everyone unique to the individual tiger, which is why camera traps or photos are the only way to count tigers. I have been told in the past, in defence of the pugmark census method that every tiger pug is unique like human fingerprints, but the slight hitch there is that human beings are a bit more cooperative than tigers.
