Bhopal: Setting a record in wildlife conservation history, forest officers have successfully trans-located a tiger from Kanha National Park in Madhya Pradesh to Satkosia reserve forest in Odisha. The male tiger weighing 195 kg was captured in the National Park and then tranquilised before being transported to Satkosia tiger reserve in a specially designed cage.
“The entire operation of capturing, tranqulising and then putting the tiger in a specially designed cage for its transportation took around one hour on Wednesday,” Kanha tiger reserve field director Sanjay Kumar Shukla, who oversaw the exercise, told this newspaper on Thursday. This was the first time in the history of wildlife conservation a big cat from a tiger reserve was successfully translocated to another state for reintroduction, he added.
Forest officers, veterinary doctors and conservationists from MP, Odisha and Delhi had supervised the translocation of the tiger. The exercise was part of a special project prepared jointly by the ministry of environment, forests and climate change, National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), and Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun, to relocate three pairs of tigers from Madhya Pradesh to Satkosia tiger reserve for reintroduction.
Satkosia tiger reserve has lost almost its entire tiger population owing to reasons such as alleged poaching and deteriorating habitat conditions forcing the Odisha government to place a request to the MP government to relocate three tiger couples.
