A wildlife biologists’ life may seem alluring from a distance, but it is often not exactly like in the swanky documentaries. Working as one, in the Terai Tiger Project of Wildlife Trust of India, I spend most of my time toiling on the tracks of the two most common big cats of India, the Bengal tiger (Panthera tigris) and the common leopard (Panthera pardus). Here, in the state of Uttar Pradesh, where the project is based, my job is to swing into action as part of the Rapid Response Team – that the project operates to assist the Forest Department to mitigate human-big cat conflicts – every time a situation of conflict arises. I observe and deduce from the tell-tale signs of incidents and the little clues that the animals leave behind, their body size, age, and sometimes also their behaviour. The camera traps that I install in such locations helps further correct or corroborate these deductions.

Often, in efforts to mitigate conflict situations, especially when a big cat has inadvertently (our long-term data shows that most attacks by tigers and leopards are accidental in nature) attacked a human – efforts are made to immediately capture the animal and relocate it. However, over the last few years, our approach has been to promote the ‘safe passage’ of animals engaged in conflicts. And this is where I come in. My job entails understanding if the incident was accidental in nature, how these individual animals seem to behave and if providing a safe passage is a viable option. Again, this may all sound very enticing, but believe me, it’s often not an easy a task to undertake. Every situation is unique, and all are equally tricky – I have inculcated a habit to not assume, and start from scratch every time. Every operation teaches me new things about how these big cats behave. A recent case that I attended in Bareilly has thus far been the most challenging operation I have addressed, and I make an attempt to elaborate my experiences here.

A Factory Hideout

Bareilly is a typical city in Uttar Pradesh in northern India – a mundane concrete jungle – surrounded by swathes of sugarcane and mustard fields as far as the eyes can see, speckled with a clusters of households that form a village or hamlet. The tall sugarcane crops all across the state has turned out crucial to the movement of big cats like tigers and leopards. Not surprising, an inconspicuous 1200 ha area of a two-decade old abandoned rubber factory – now overgrown with natural vegetation and populated by wild prey species such as black buck and Nilgai – became the refuge for a wandering tigress in 2020. While it wasn’t really a risk for people since it relied almost exclusively on the wild prey here, the perceived fear elicited by knowledge of a tiger taking residence in your back yard was reason enough for the State Forest Department to decide to capture and relocate it. They began a search operation in the month of March 2020, but in vain. The tigress appeared to be highly elusive, exploiting the multitude of worn out structures, tunnels and buildings to elude its potential captors. Perhaps she knew they were after her, perhaps it was just her second nature. As luck would have it she accidentally ended up injuring two people one day when she tried venturing out of the premises. That is when our support was called in. After all, our team had caught another adult male tiger in this very same abandoned factory only a couple of years back!

It was the end of May 2021, nearly after a year this tigress had remained elusive to prying eyes, with only an occasional image getting captured on camera traps, when I was requested to attend to the case. Having just recovered from a severe spell of Covid, I was in a dilemma. I was too exhausted to go, but the case was very enticing. And I had not been part of the previous case back in 2018 (Watch video here). So it was decided, and without further deliberation, I packed my bags.

Hide and Seek

At Bareilly, I met my field assistant Palu, and together we swung into checking old camera trap images and mapping the direction and time of movements of this tigress. Drawing inferences from this, I began deploying my camera traps and recording her pugmarks from 4 to 10 AM and then again from 3 to 7 PM. Sometimes we thought we saw her – more often we felt she was seeing us – as she would decide to change her course to avoid us. Several days passed by, yet we understood little of her movements…but by mid-June a pattern seemed to emerge. On the eastern corner of the premises there were several massive old rusty tankers surrounded by heavy thorny scrub vegetation. Almost all of her daily meanderings through the premises appeared to begin and end at this juncture. Consulting my boss, we deduced that this must be the place she is using to rest during the day. Tigers by nature are nocturnal – beginning their activity near sundown and going back to bed by early morning.

I swiftly shifted a bunch of my camera traps to this one location, and voila! our guess was right. Once this was taken care of, on June 16, I decided to do something that scared me to my wits. Along with my field assistant and a couple of forest guards, I decided to venture into the thickets that she routinely seemed to be disappearing into – as without being sure exactly where she was taking refuge it would be almost impossible to even try and capture her. We waded through the thorny vegetation for some time and then decided this was a futile effort and were just about to turn back, when loud alarm calls from a troop of monkeys ahead of us alerted us to a possible presence of the tigress. It is fascinating how, these rhesus macaques (Macaca mulata) are still able to recognise a predator, with so many generations of monkeys never encountering one!

No sooner had we heard the calls, we heard some rustling farther ahead and thought the tigress could have moved ahead on being detected by the macaques…so with trepidation we waded on…until we came into an opening near the tanks. Treading as softly as we could, we began observing the openings on the tanks – small, one and half feet wide circular inlets at a height of 5-6 feet on each tank. One particular such opening caught my eye. All the openings on the other tanks were meshed by cobwebs, except this one. Without testing our luck any further, we quickly set up a camera trap facing this entrance and rapidly headed back out of the thickets.

I spent a sleepless night…with incessant fleeting thoughts of the tigress, her whereabouts and of the validity of my intuitions.

Tigress in the tank

Early next morning I rushed back to the site — a frenzied fumbling with the camera trap to check if anything had been captured at all – and then a few seconds later triumphant smiles broke out on all our faces as we peered over the brief footage of the tigress effortlessly walking into the tank through the inlet.

The next few hours went by in a frenzy of action in total silence. Heavy gauge nets blocked the entrance, and Palu our scout climbed atop the tank to double check if the tigress was indeed inside. Palu’s excited look was enough to indicate that she indeed was inside. Once confirmed, a cage was setup at the entrance to try to lure her into it to avoid chemically sedating her. But the effort was in vain, and the next day a massive tranquilisation operation was launched. Dr. Daksh Gangwar, WTI’s former team member, now a veterinarian with the Pilibhit Tiger Reserve, successfully sedated her, and an earthmover which had been brought in earlier in the day, was deployed to tear open the rusty wall of the tank. She was swiftly put in a transportation crate and taken to Dudhwa Tiger Reserve as per the directives of senior Forest Department officials, where she was successfully released back into the wild.

While all of this seemed to end happily for tigress who went back to the wild, I was left with a nagging notion. This was the second tiger captured and removed from the factory in three years. Was the factory now free of tigers for good? What if another tiger ventured into this space? How many of them were we going to capture and relocate?

The struggle for space

Tigers like most predators need space to thrive in, and these spaces need to be connected so that tigers which disperse can do so with minimal interaction with humans. The sugarcane fields of Uttar Pradesh coupled with such isolated refuges as the abandoned rubber factory of Bareilly with a great prey base, constitute such connectivity. They allow tigers in search of good habitats to move great distances for survival. Perhaps then, we only need to promulgate greater understanding about these big cats, and increase our own tolerance towards them, especially when they use human dominated landscapes. Our work is critical to ensure animals and people stay safe and learn to co-exist in their own spaces.  The struggle is real on both sides.

The Terai Tiger Project is generously supported by U.S. Fish & Wildlife Services and Chester Zoo.

About the author:

Sushant Soma is a Wildlife Biologist working with WTI’s Terai Tiger Project. Despite having started his career in IT engineering, Sushant had always been interested to work in wildlife. Consequently, he pursued and earned his M.Sc. degree in wildlife conservation in September 2019 and soon after joined WTI.