Year later, another big cat caught on cam at Sahyadri Tiger Reserve

A year after it recorded the first sighting of a tiger in the Sahyadri Tiger Reserve (STR) in eight years, the forest department has caught another big cat of the habitat on camera.

"A camera trap in the Radhanagari wildlife sanctuary has captured a male tiger in the first week of May. This is a young male," Satyajeet Gujar, chief conservator of forests (CCF) at the Sahyadri Tiger Reserve said.

The reserve, which covers the Koyna Wildlife Sanctuary and Chandoli National Park, suffers from lack of breeding, resident tigers, and a poor prey base.

In May 2018, a tiger was captured on camera in the Chandoli National Park on May 23 and 24. This was the first photographic evidence of a big cat in the habitat in around a decade.

The 1,165.56 square kilometre-big STR includes a 600.12 square kilometre core and 565.45 square kilometre buffer in Satara, Sangli, Kolhapur, and Ratnagiri. According to the 2014 tiger census, the STR has between five to eight tigers based on scat DNA and model-based predictions, making it a low-intensity tiger reserve. However, these are not resident, breeding cats, but intermittent visitors.

Activities like bauxite mining in Kolhapur has affected the STR's connectivity to source populations and habitats in the south, such as Karnataka's Kali Tiger Reserve.

Gujar said they would compare the two camera trap images to confirm if the same tiger had been sighted at two places. He added that the tiger was likely to be an itinerant rather than a resident. The source population for these tigers is estimated to be Sindhudurg, from where around six breeding cubs have dispersed.

The forest department is proposing a wildlife sanctuary at Tillari in Sindhudurg to serve as a source population for the reserve, but officials admitted that the plan was being stonewalled by local plantation owners. Similarly, it is eager to demarcate the Radhanagari sanctuary as a satellite core for the STR.

The forest department is also looking at translocating tigers from crowded landscapes into the STR.

Once completed, this will be the first such tiger relocation in the wild in Maharashtra. It will evaluate the feasibility of ecologically unsustainable projects in the landscape like mining and use of windmills; activities that affect the movements of carnivores from source populations in the south. It will also suggest measures for strengthening tiger corridors.

Tiger translocation has helped enhance the tiger population in reserves like Panna and Sariska, where poaching had wiped them off. Cambodia, where tigers are extinct, has sought India's help to re-introduce them.

Maharashtra has six tiger reserves. The 2014 tiger census said India has 2,226 tigers, up from 1,706 in 2010. Maharashtra has around 190 such big cats, more than the figure of 169 in 2010. The 2018 tiger census, results for which are yet to be declared formally, has estimated around 245 adult tigers in the state.