Chamarajanagar: Its time once again for the country to check if it is succeeding in protecting its tigers from poachers. The last estimation in 2014 revealed there were 2,226 tigers in the country and Karnataka’s five tiger reserves of Bhadra, Biligiriranga Hills, Nagarahole, Bandipur and Kali were home to 417 of these big cats.
And now forest officials around the country are all set to begin training for the fourth cycle of the all- India tiger estimation that could be done in January-February 2018 using camera traps in all 50 tiger reserves and forests of the country, according to National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) sources. The officials will complete their training for the exercise in November-December, they reveal.
The coming estimation could take about 25 days in a particular block before the cameras are shifted to another. “The entire process will be completed in 60 days,” said an NCTA official, explaining that the tiger estimation was usually done before summer and the onset of the monsoon. With the exercise being carried out once in four years across the country , the previous estimations were done in 2006, 2010 and 2014.
Between each tiger estimation, every tiger reserve does in-house monitoring of the big cats using camera trapping once every six months. The latest camera trapping done by the Bhadra tiger reserve in Chikkamagaluru revealed it had around 33 tigers and a similar exercise carried out in Bandipur National Park showed it had 139 tigers in its ranges, reveal sources.
