Three Rescue Teams in Place to Capture Tiger

Hyderabad: Telangana may soon have its first radio collared tiger with the state forest department making plans to move ahead with capturing the tiger which has been moving around the state over the past four months — and currently taking shelter in a small ravine with a stream near Arepalli village in Siddipet district - and putting a radio collar on it.

While no official word has been released on the plans to capture the tiger by tranquillising it with a sedative dart, sources said that with the tiger appearing to have more or less ‘settled’ in an area bereft of any forest that it can live in - in a 100 km radius — it has been decided to go ahead and catch it. Once this is achieved, a radio collar will be fixed on its neck which will help wildlife officials to monitor its movements and study its behaviour.

It is learnt that since the tiger had killed several cattle, with at least five such kills attributed to it since Sunday, the best way forward will be to capture it safely, and then later release it in a protected forest, likely either in Kawal Tiger Reserve or in Amrabad Tiger Reserve. “There is no real forest for the tiger to go to in a 100-km radius. The best decision is to capture it and release it in a proper forest,” a forest department official said. The officials also fear that the longer the tiger keeps roaming around human habitations, as it had been doing for the past several weeks that it spent in Yadadri-Bhongir district and then in Siddipet district, the more the chances are that it might eventually come into some kind of a confrontation with humans, something the forest department officials said they do not want to see happen.

And as part of the efforts to catch it, the department has stationed near Arepalli village two of its teams with wildlife veterinarians – one from Nehru Zoological Park in Hyderabad, and another from the Kakatiya Zoo Park in Warangal - in addition to the RES-Q team from Pune which too has a wildlife veterinarian in its group.

However, officials said capturing the tiger may be easier said than done as the tiger is in an open area, though it is currently reported to be taking shelter in a small ravine like area with a stream where it had earlier fed on a cow it had killed and dragged its carcass to. “The situation is not like the one near Rajahmundry in Andhra Pradesh where another tiger was captured. There is was in a cattle shed and the rescue team could site itself in a spot from where the tiger could be darted. Here, it is in the open and it is so far shown that it wants to be nowhere near humans and darting it will require a clean and clear line of sight. But where it is now, it might not be possible to tranquillise it,” another official said.

If it does get captured – National Tiger Conservation Authority protocols prohibit such efforts at night – and as and when that occurs, then the tiger is expected to be brought to the Nehru Zoological Park where it will be kept under observation for a couple of days after which it will be taken and released in one of the two tiger reserves. Since it did not find Kawal suitable, after having spent a couple of weeks there before it moved south and ended up in Siddipet district, it may be released in Amrabad Tiger Reserve which has the requisite habitat, and prey resources for a tiger to establish its territory, it is learnt.