India is rightly celebrating its success at conserving tigers with the all-India tiger census results published on July 29 showing a remarkable 33 per cent increase of its population in the last four years. That’s a beautiful headline at a time when most natural history news resembles doomsday scenarios. We must thoroughly congratulate all those behind this extraordinary turnaround.
However, we should also ask why this is happening in India (and Nepal), when the rest of Asia’s wildlife is disappearing at an alarming rate. Most other tiger-range countries, 13 in all, are experiencing tiger extinction, most rapidly and recently in the once plentiful forests of Southeast Asia.
Two bits of earlier news help illustrate the ground reality behind these figures.
Firstly, Kawal Tiger Reserve in Telangana—a park nobody has ever heard of and few
care about—lost its only remaining tiger to poaching last year. And secondly, another report in January this year showed the exact opposite. The government’s own scientists at the Wildlife Institute of India reported that many tiger parks (all of which I know well and have visited often) were now full of the big cats and that park authorities could not cope with any increase in population.
So why this extraordinary difference between India’s tiger reserves? Too full or completely empty?
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Karnataka Forest Department has ordered shoot or capture orders of a tiger that allegedly killed an 80-year-old farmer outside Bandipur Tiger Reserve on Tuesday. Shuivalingappa, the farmer from Hundipur village near the Reserve, was mauled to death reportedly by a tiger. The incident occurred when the victim was working in his field.
When the tiger went into nearby bushes, the locals tried to revive Shivalingappa. This is the second human casualty since September 1 from the village located on the edges of Gopala Swamy Betta Wildlife Range. First, the villagers had tried to locate the animal in a bid to chase it away, but they were in for a shock when the big cat sprung out from the buses and made a dash for the forest.
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A dog owner fears her dog was attacked by a huge panther after the two animals came face to face in the woods.
Kayleigh Holmes said 11-month-old black Labrador-Rottweiler cross Loki ended up with a massive scratch on his head after she saw it in a stand off with a 'panther or puma' from afar.
She claims her pooch was 'nearly dinner' after it ran off and was met with the 'yellow-eyed' creature during an afternoon stroll on Sunday.
The mum-of-three said Loki initially stood his ground growling and baring his teeth while husband Adam Holmes, 39, frantically tried to distract the muscular black beast.
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A pair of African servals have been rescued by the Lions, Tigers & Bears big cat and exotic animal sanctuary, it announced Thursday.
The two large wild cats, named Junior and Miss Kitty, lived with an owner in Arizona but were left without adequate care when that person died. The sanctuary agreed to take the cats in after the owner's spouse contacted founder Bobbi Brink.
Junior and Miss Kitty are both roughly 8 or 9 years old and are currently receiving routine examinations from the sanctuary's veterinary staff. The two cats will join the sanctuary's other rescued serval, Denali, once their new dens are constructed and they are released from their quarantine habitat.
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Showing indomitable courage, an 11-year-old girl saved her younger brother from a leopard attack in Devkundai Talli village in the district but was badly injured in the process.
The incident took place on October 4 when the girl identified as Rakhi was playing with her 4-year-old brother and was attacked by the leopard, her aunt Madhu Devi said, giving details of the incident.
Instead of running away, the girl lay over her brother to cover him and saved him from the big cat. Though the boy remained largely unharmed, she received severe neck injuries, Madhu Devi said.
The villagers soon gathered at the spot and raised an alarm following which the leopard ran into the forest.
She was rushed first to a nearby hospital from where she was referred to a higher centre considering the seriousness of the injuries she had received in the attack.
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Nancy Earl had seen bobcats in her Varsity backyard and they’d always bolted when confronted.
But the 70-year-old retired dentist said she received a rude awakening to the fearsome unpredictability of wild animals in August, when she was attacked and badly injured by one of the big cats.
On the evening of Aug. 23, Earl said her two cats confronted a larger animal in their enclosed yard, which backs onto Dale Hodges and Bowmont parks.
“I started yelling at it and my two cats raced back into the house . . . it was very aggressive, it was snarling,” said Earl.
That was when the bobcat she estimates weighed nine kilograms launched itself from the home’s patio about a metre away and onto her chest.
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Saitoti Petro scans a dirt road in northern Tanzania for recent signs of the top predator on the African savannah. "If you see a lion," he warns, "stop and look it straight in the eyes – you must never run."
Mr. Petro points to a fresh track in the dirt, a paw print measuring nearly the length of a ballpoint pen. He walks along a few more yards reading tracks the way an archaeologist might decipher hieroglyphics, gleaning meaning from the smudges in the dust. A large male passed here within the past two hours, he says. "Here he's walking slowly, then you see his claws come out in the tracks. Perhaps he's running after prey, or from something else."
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