Early Tuesday morning ( August 12) , the sleepy village of Karira in Rajasthan’s Sawai Madhopur district found itself at the centre of an unusual wildlife drama. Nestled in the buffer zone of Ranthambhore National Park, the village is used to the occasional leopard sighting or tiger rumor, but this time the visitor was an animal none of the villagers had ever seen up close — a cheetah. And not just any cheetah. This was Jwala, a radio-collared female brought from Namibia last year and currently part of India’s ambitious cheetah introduction project at Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh. Somehow, she had strayed nearly 180 kilometres from her designated home and ended up in the heart of rural Rajasthan. Cheetah in the Village The first hints of trouble came at dawn, when villagers awoke to find goats bleating unusually as if sounding alert .The villagers were terrified after they spotted an animal — much slimmer than a leopard, with tear-like markings down its face — had been seen i...
The dispersing tigers of Bhopal seem to be watching helplessly as their habitat grows smaller, food getting scarcer while a smarter set of predators, the land sharks, increasingly devour their habitat. As you read this, prowling somewhere in the fast-dwindling forests of Kaliasot- Kathotia-Kerwa , on the city outskirts, are 18 magnificent tigers, whose future hangs on the pen tips of Bhopal’s babudom. Pending Tiger Issues Many times, some of these dispersing tigers have left the balding jungle cover and strayed into the National Judicial Academy at Bhadbhada , as if knocking its doors for justice Two tiger issues have been pending for long. After the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) accorded a status of tiger reserve to Ratapani sanctuary , the source population of Bhopal tigers, in 2013, the state ...