Mating Season Sparks Hope For New Tiger Cubs
Tigers migrated into Adilabad in search of mates and made the district forests their home. Officials expect that the female tigers may give birth to cubs if they meet the male tiger in the jungles of Kawal.
ADILABAD: Forest officials in the erstwhile Adilabad district are considering this winter special, following news that a male and two female tigers have come close in the buffer area of the Kawal Tiger Reserve. Forest staff pinned a lot of hopes on tiger breeding this winter season, as male and female tigers are moving through the forest of the erstwhile Adilabad district.
Tigers migrated into Adilabad in search of mates and made the district forests their home. Officials expect that the female tigers may give birth to cubs if they meet the male tiger in the jungles of Kawal. Officials say that two female tigers are moving in the Bellampalli forest range, and a male tiger recently migrated into the Jodeghat area from Maharashtra.
A forest officer of the Kawal Tiger Reserve says they pinned a lot of hopes on the tigers' mating, as winter is considered the mating season, but refused to divulge the location where they were moving now.
A male tiger also migrated into Boath a few days ago, and it moved to Sirikonda, where it killed a cow near Sathmore village. However, the tiger movement was not found in the same locality. Another version is that the tiger that moved into the Sirikonda has entered the Indhanpalli forest area and later proceeded to Islampur village. The forest officials said there was every possibility that a male tiger would move towards Sirpur (U) in search of mates. The tigers in the Kawal Tiger core and buffer areas are facing the threat of electrocution because villagers have strung live electric wires for hunting on the fringes of their villages Lingapur, Kanchanpalli, Islampur, Vanjariguda, Mamidipalli and Kothapalli in Jainoor mandal, which is a buffer area of the Kawal Tiger Reservoir.
It is learnt that recently, forest staff removed 5 km of metal wire to deter herbivores. But tigers may accidentally fall into the trap and be electrocuted. Some farmers set up live electric wire as fencing to protect their standing crops from wild animals, especially wild boars. Forest staff found the pugmarks of a tiger near a Kushnapalli Orre in Bejjur mandal in the Kagaznagar division. Kagaznagar FDO Susant Bobade said, ‘they have regularly been tracking the movement of the tigers in the Kagaznagar forest division since tigers migrated into their division from the bordering Maharashtra’. He said, ‘they were analysing the direction of the tigers with their pugmarks collected by the animal trackers’.
