Assam’s Manas Reserve has more tigresses than tigers
The Hindu
Annual monitoring results of the trans-boundary World Heritage Site was released on Global Tiger Day
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The Manas Tiger Reserve in Assam has 2.4 tigresses for every tiger, the annual wildlife monitoring results of the trans-boundary wildlife preserve has revealed.
According to the latest camera trapping assessment stipulated by the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), the 2,837.31 sq. km reserve with a critical tiger habitat area of 536.22 sq. km has 52 adult tigers along with eight cubs.
This is an increase of eight adults and four cubs over 2021, the results released by Pramod Boro, the Chief Executive Member of the Bodoland Territorial Region on Global Tiger Day showed.
The assessment said 29 tigers were “repeated” from 2021 while 23 new tigers were reported. The gender of 27 tigers could be properly ascertained – eight of them males and 19 females, giving a sex ratio of 1:2.4, which is “positively skewed towards females from the ecological point of view”, a statement from NTCA said.
The Manas Tiger Reserve authorities had set up 381 camera trap stations with support from conservation partners World Wide Fund for Nature-India, Wildlife Trust of India and Aaranyak.
Mr. Boro also released the results of the population estimate of all other major species found in the reserve, claimed to have been done for the first time in a holistic manner by the tiger reserve’s frontline staff through distance sampling.
Aasheesh Pittie says birdwatching is not very unlike hunting, except that nothing is killed. “You track… you want to follow the bird… see it,” he says about this activity that he has pursued for nearly fifty years. Pittie, the editor of the ornithological journal Indian Birds, author of many classic reference books about birds and most recently, a collection of bird essays titled The Living Air: Pleasures of Birds and Birdwatching, was speaking at an event organised by the Archives of the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS).