With winter come tiger conflicts, deaths in Asifabad

Hyderabad: Come November and people in villages along the forest patches in KB Asifabad district not only start shivering with the winter cold that dips into the single digits, but also with fear as tigers from Maharashtra begin migrating into Telangana in search of a new home in the erstwhile Adilabad district area.

The death of 21-year-old Morle Laxmi on Friday following an attack by a tiger near Nazrulnagar in Kagaznagar mandal while she was out picking cotton, is the fifth incident of tigers attacking humans in the past four years during November and December.

“In these corridor areas, just after the monsoon, there is a profusion of growth of grass and shrubs, just as the crop season gets under way. All this growth provides cover for the migrating tigers searching either for new territories or may be a mate,” said Imran Siddiqui, senior field conservationist, Centre for Wildlife Studies-India, and founder of Hyderabad Tiger Conservation Society, who has spent years as a field biologist in the area.

“Tigers have taken to using this post monsoon cover to move from one area to another as the forest areas are highly fragmented, and it is inevitable that they will cross paths with habitations and people.”

The post-monsoon month of October, and the winter months of November and December are also the breeding season for tigers, and it is quite likely that tigers looking for a mate could get quite jumpy, forest department officials said. “With respect to those looking for territory, such tigers typically are sub-adults which in a way are fully charged up, yet to learn the ways of staying safe, or avoiding humans,” Siddiqui said.

Among the reasons — in addition to forests of Maharashtra reaching optimal carrying capacity of tigers due to decades of serious conservation work by that state’s forest department and younger tigers forced to search for new territories — is the fact that several resident tigers in Asifabad district have gone missing over the past few years.

Such being the case, it should not come as a surprise that new tigers could be coming in, exploring the area to find a suitable range for setting down and marking their territories.

Incidentally, the Chandrapur district of Maharashtra abutting Telangana has been home to tigers coming into conflict with people, and it may not be out of the realm of possibility that some migrating into Telangana may have been involved in such incidents there. According to available statistics, 111 human deaths as a result of conflict with tigers were reported in the district in 2022-23, while 59 people were reported to have already lost their lives in 2023-24.

A senior National Tiger Conservation Authority official told Deccan Chronicle that if the Telangana forest officials manage to capture camera trap images – of both flanks — of the tiger suspected to have been involved in Friday’s attack, then the images can be compared with the database of Maharashtra’s tigers to identify the individual and figure out where exactly it came from in the neighbouring state.

Only a thorough investigation and tracking back the tiger’s movements with Maharashtra forest officials can come close to establishing if the tiger involved in Friday’s incident had been involved in any previous conflict with humans, a forest department official said.