A curious case of missing tigers in India’s Ranthambore National Park has raised concerns about how authorities monitor and update fluctuating tiger numbers, and how they define “missing,” contributor Deshdeep Saxena reports for Mongabay India.
In early November, Pavan Kumar Upadhyay, the principal chief conservator of forests and chief wildlife warden of the state of Rajasthan, where Ranthambore National Park is located, released an order announcing that 25 tigers were missing from the park’s tiger monitoring report.
“The field director of the park has not been able to give any satisfactory reply on the issue,” the order said. “There was no solid evidence of 11 tigers for over a year, while 14 tigers had not been found for less than a year.”
Hinting at a lack of coordination, two days later, the field director submitted a contradictory report saying that 10 of the 25 missing tigers were recently spotted by camera trap, information that was supposedly already relayed to Upadhyay’s office. As for the remaining 15 missing tigers, park officials who spoke on condition of anonymity told Mongabay India that 11 of those tigers have been missing for five years and are unlikely to return, while only four tigers can truly be called missing.
Upadhyay told Mongabay India that after accounting for the reconfirmed tigers and nine others that are very old and may have disappeared, there were still six tigers remaining to be traced. A three-member committee has been tasked to look into the issue further.
Tiger Watch, an independent conservation organization working in Ranthambore, published its own analysis, putting forward possible explanations for the disappearance of 15 tigers. These include seven tigers that were around 19 to 20 years old and two that were 13 to 14 years old.
“Tigers typically live up to around 15 years; surviving beyond that age is difficult,” Tiger Watch executive director Dharmendra Khandal told Mongabay India. He added that an aging tiger typically hides, and when it dies, its decomposing carcass can be difficult to find.
An official from the National Tiger Conservation Authority told Mongabay India the authority is investigating all possible reasons for the tigers’ absence, including possible poaching.
What makes the situation complicated is the lack of a clear definition for a “missing” tiger, and the point at which it can be removed from the database, Mongabay India found.
The protocol for updating the park’s tiger population data requires an authentic government source to confirm and report a tiger death. All tiger deaths are treated as “poaching cases” unless proven otherwise, and categorizing a death as natural needs evidence, which can be challenging to get.
“We need to have some guidelines on when to stop counting the numbers of the aged tigers from our tiger data,” a forest official said.
This is a summary of “The missing tigers of Ranthambore” by Deshdeep Saxena.
Banner image of a Ranthambore tiger by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.
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