Nepal is preparing to relocate 18 blackbucks from the country’s west to its south central region, near the popular Chitwan National Park.
Officials say the translocation will help establish a population of the antelope in a new habitat and safeguard the species against localized disasters or disease, but conservationists question the choice of habitat and considerations of predation risk, reports Mongabay contributor Bibek Bhandari.
According to the translocation plan, six male and 12 female blackbucks (Antilope cervicapra) will be moved from Shuklaphanta National Park and Blackbuck Conservation Area in Bardiya to an enclosure in Tikauli, a corridor forest near Chitwan.
While blackbucks are not listed as globally threatened on the IUCN Red List, they are considered to be critically endangered within Nepal. Conservation efforts have helped revive the blackbuck population in Nepal from just nine known individuals in 1975 in Bardiya to more than 500 today.
At Tikauli, the blackbucks will be housed in a roughly 20-hectare (50-acre) enclosed area within a protected forest. However, ecologists are concerned about the suitability of Tikauli.
Amar Kunwar, a community ecologist who has researched blackbuck conservation, told Mongabay that the mammals prefer hot, arid regions with short grasslands. Chitwan’s monsoonal climate is humid and prone to flooding, and its grasses can reach heights of 4.5 meters (15 feet), which limits food availability and hinders the animals’ ability to detect predators.
Chitwan also supports high tiger and leopard densities.
“As blackbucks roam the area once translocated, they are likely to attract leopards,” said Bishnu Prasad Acharya, chief of the Division Forest Office in Chitwan, which will monitor the enclosure once the animals are relocated. He said that leopards, often pushed to the forest fringes where the relocation site sits, may use surrounding trees to leap over the enclosure’s fences. This vulnerability was highlighted in 2018 when more than 50 blackbucks were killed by predators in Bardiya in a single year.
The enclosure is also near a highway, a municipal waste dump that attracts feral dogs, and a ground used for an annual carnival. Quantitative ecologist Rohit Raj Jha noted these factors create “multiple layers of chronic disturbance” for a species that relies heavily on vigilance.
Kunwar added that high densities of existing deer species in Chitwan, such as chital, are expected to intensify competition for resources.
Officials said they hope the project will enhance local tourism — the local municipality has invested approximately $163,000 on infrastructure.
However, Kunwar argued that tourism should not motivate translocations. “True success would be when the population is released from the enclosure to the wild and the population survives, breeds and maintains its healthy population in the wild,” Kunwar said.
Acharya acknowledged the risks but said such trials were necessary “to save these critically endangered species.”
Read the full story by Bibek Bhandari here.
Banner image: A herd of blackbucks graze in Blackbuck Conservation Area, Bardiya. Image by Shadow Ayush via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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