Tigress T138 finds a new home at Buxa Tiger Reserve

A three-year-old tigress, T138, was released into the Buxa Tiger Reserve in West Bengal on Friday, marking the beginning of a phased programme to reintroduce tigers and establish a viable, self-sustaining population in the reserve.

The tigress was translocated from Bihar’s Valmiki Tiger Reserve and released in the presence of Union Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav and West Bengal Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari. Mr. Adhikari said three more tigers would be released in Buxa in the next two months, and the initiative would not only help in conservation of wildlife but also in boosting tourism in the region.

“Inspired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s push for landscape conservation and species protection, today we have fulfilled the significant promise to reintroduce a tiger in Buxa. T138 has been brought from Valmiki Tiger Reserve in Bihar to Buxa.” Mr. Yadav posted on social media.

Buxa was declared a tiger reserve in 1983, and over the past few years there have been no reports of tiger presence in the region. “Over the decades, however, habitat degradation and fragmentation, changes in land use and decline in prey availability have affected the ecological conditions required to sustain a resident tiger population. The Reserve subsequently witnessed a prolonged absence of a stable resident tiger population,” a press statement by the PIB said.

According to the statement, the recovery of Buxa has been a sustained, science-based effort and the Tiger Augmentation and Recovery Project, initiated by the Government of West Bengal with support from the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the Wildlife Institute of India (WII), has been implemented collaboratively since 2018.

Senior forest officials said T138 would be subject to intensive post-release monitoring using a combination of telemetry, camera trapping and field-based monitoring to assess her movement, adaptation, health and behaviour.

“The programme is not merely about bringing tigers back to Buxa. Its objective is to create the conditions in which a tiger population can establish, breed and ultimately become viable and self-sustaining,” the Union Environment Ministry said.

West Bengal also has a resident tiger population in the Sundarbans, where the last tiger census has revealed the presence of 100 tigers in the unique mangrove ecosystem.

The restoration of tigers in Buxa will augment tiger presence in north Bengal, which has significant ecological linkages with the forests of Assam and Bhutan and provides opportunities for movement and dispersal of wildlife across a larger connected landscape, the statement said.

The NTCA, in collaboration with different State governments, has taken up tiger reintroduction initiatives across 12 tiger reserves, from Sariska Tiger Reserve in Rajasthan to Simlipal Tiger Reserve in Odisha.

Experts point out that the success of the programme has not been uniform across the country.