By Shahnawaz Akhtar, IANS,
Bhopal : An orphan tigress of Kanha National Park was Sunday morning released into the forests of Panna National Park under the rewilding programme of the wildlife authorities.
The tigress of the Kanha will join her sister who was translocated eight months ago to Panna.
“We will keep a close watch on the movements of this tigress (called T5) in the first 15 to 30 days,” R. Sriniwas Murthy, the field director of Panna Tiger Reserve, told IANS.
“But it will at least take three months for her to adapt fully to the surroundings of Panna,” he said. “Her sister has adapted to the environment successfully and is doing things on her own, we hope she (T5) will also adopt it,” he added.
Earlier, the tigress which was translocated by road under the supervision of wildlife doctors and officers of Kanha National Park, reached Panna Saturday night covering a distance of 450 km.
Before the translocation, the tigress was tranquilised while her physical parameters were recorded and a radio-caller attached to her in the presence of Wildlife Institute of India (Dehradun) specialists, said Kanha National Park director J.S. Chouhan.
The six-year-old tigress is among the three cubs that survived after their mother died fighting a tiger.
These cubs were later housed in a specially-built enclosure in Mukki Circle by Kanha management to expose them to the killing of prey.
The male cub was shifted to Van Vihar in Bhopal about three years ago while the two tigresses had successfully developed their natural instinct of killing prey in the enclosure.
The mother trains her cubs in the killing of prey and if she dies before she can do so, such cubs cannot be released in the wild and are sent to zoos.
The Kanha and Panna national parks are two of the six tiger reserves in Madhya Pradesh. The 1,945 sq km Kanha park was set up in 1955. According to Tiger Census-2011, Kanha has about 60 tigers.
Spread across over 500 sq km, Panna was created in 1981. Now Panna has five adult tigers — one male and four females — and six cubs.
(Shahnawaz Akhtar can be contacted at [email protected])