Kawal Tiger Reserve Marks 13 Years Of Being Tiger Free
“There is information that one of the surviving cubs got separated from its mother, grew weak and died, and there was no further information of S6 or its other two cubs: Reports
HYDERABAD: The Kawal tiger reserve in Telangana is all set to see its 13th straight International Tiger Day on Tuesday without a single tiger in its 2015.44 sq km expanse, making it one of the few tiger reserves in the country to have gone without having the apex predator for which the reserve was created for more than a decade.
Incidentally, the current fate of Kawal, bereft of tigers, appears to have parallels with the disappearance of the ‘first family’ of tigers led by ‘Phalguna’, a tigress that was the first to move from Maharashtra into the tiger corridor forests of what is now KB Asifabad district and gave birth to the first of its two litters in 2015.
Of the eight cubs she gave birth to, only one reportedly made it to adulthood and moved north and is reported to have formed a territory of its own in forests on the Chhattisgarh and Odisha borders.
There has also been no trace of Phalguna for the past several years and the big cat is believed to have been poached. If she died a natural death, her remains were never seen.
Even more tragic was the case of K4, a female cub from Phalguna’s first litter, which was discovered with a tight wire snare around its abdomen. She is believed to have died because of her injuries. K4’s remains too were never found and officials for long have maintained that it, along with its other siblings may have migrated to Chhattisgarh forests.
Phalguna was the first breeding female to have found a home in the tiger corridor forests in KB Asifabad district, and was also celebrated by the Centre with the department of posts issuing a special postage stamp to mark the tigress as a possible matriarch that could eventually populate the Kawal tiger reserve.
Another female S6, which moved in and gave birth to four cubs also in the KB Asifabad district, too is reported to have died, likely a victim of consuming a poisoned cattle carcass which one of its cubs too had fed on and died in January 2024.
This cub was found dead along with a male tiger S8 and it along with S6 and the cubs was moving around as a family of two adults and four cubs.
“There is information that one of the surviving cubs got separated from its mother, grew weak and died, and there was no further information of S6 or its other two cubs. Unless there is evidence that they survived and moved to another state, it must be presumed that they too died, or were poached,” a source said.
