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Madhya Pradesh: Panna tigress gets a new radio collar

BHOPAL: Panna’s P222 has a fancy new accessory. The tigress that had been eluding forest officials for days was finally tranquilised and fitted with a new radio collar on Saturday.


The old radio collar, fitted on P222 in 2014, had to be removed because it was emitting weak signals, making it difficult for rangers to track it in Panna Tiger Reserve, officials said.

“Several attempts were made to track and tranquilise this tigress at a suitable location for months but it all went in vain due to difficult terrain. This time, mahouts played an important role in tracking the tigress,” said Panna’s deputy field director R J Ram Hari.

The new collar is a very high frequency (VHF) one. After the collar was replaced, it was released. Tracking P222 is all the more important because it gave birth to three cubs in its third litter in August 2018.

Panna is doing everything it can to get back its stripes. In early 2009, PTR had lost all its tigers, leading to a major re-introduction project in which tigers were relocated to this reserve to revive their population. Of the ‘founder population’, four were tigresses (T1, T2, T4, T5) and one male (T3). Tigress P222 was born in T2’s second litter, marking the success of former PTR director RS Murthy-led tiger reintroduction programme. Now, just a decade later, Panna has over 40 tigers.

Officials keep a constant watch on tigers, quite aware of the fact that even radio-collared tigers were caught in poacher’s snares and killed. In 2017, three-year-old T521 was killed by a deadly clutch-wire trap laid by poachers in Panna. The forest officials assigned to track it faced an inquiry.

There was an alleged attempt to hack into the Iridium Satellite Collar of a tiger and trail its movements in Satpura Tiger Reserve (STR) from Pune in Maharashtra a few years ago. It was apparently the first of its kind of cyber-offence. The Wildlife Institute of India (WII) called it a ‘cyber poaching attempt’ and asked for an FIR. It was after this attempt that the forest department replaced iridium collars with VHF ones.

The six tiger reserves in Madhya Pradesh — Bandhavgarh, Kanha, Panna, Bori-Satpura, Sanjay Dubri and Pench — have 257 big cats, most of who have VHF radio collars.

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