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 in 2022 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 in ...
When Walker wandered over 3000 kms last year, the three year old tiger seemed to have given a wake up call to the government and its officials busy in achieving a bizarre target, the target of doubling the tiger population. Termed as TX2, it is a global goal to make the tiger population two- folds by 2022. In 2010, all the 13 tiger range countries joined hands in St Petersburg and set the target. India, with the largest tiger population in the world, is busy in achieving the objective. Too obsessed with their tiger number, they seemed to have forgotten the forests and preservation of the corridors. The wake-up call from Walker underlines the significance of forest corridors. The Epic Walk In March, 2020 this radio-collared tiger in India grabbed global attention by taking a roundabout route of forests starting from Tipeshwer wildlife sanctuary in Yavatmal district in Maharashtra in June 2019. From here, the tiger went to Telangana before re-entering Maharashtra again and f...