Leopard Updates
A lot has happened in Valparai since I last posted about the captured leopard. We did a bunch of press releases in the local news papers and it seems to have been well received except for the fact that the article appeared on a day when another leopard picked up a small girl in a tea estate and killed that girl.
People of course were angry which prompted the forest department to deploy traps in and around the area where the girl was killed. Last week, a young leopard was captured around that area. Anand, the NCF biologist who deals with conflict situations in this area, thinks its just a year and a half old and too small to kill a young girl. Either way it has been branded as a man-eater and since people felt that its not safe to release it back in the wild again, the Forest Department have moved it to the Madras zoo. Soon everyone realised that this was a young leopard and could not have been the same one that killed the girl. So now the forest department is under pressure to deploy some more traps to capture the mother of this young leopard or any other individual which people think is the actual leopard that killed the girl.
I really don’t think there is a better solution than taking these animals to captivity. However its very tough to find the right one which actually killed the girl and in the process of finding the right one, many leopards are getting caught. In relatively prey-rich areas like this, it may not be too wrong to judge these incidents as accident and not necessarily a birth of a “man-eating” leopard. We should be able to identify individuals using forensics, size and rosette patterns, and/or by implanting transponders on captures and relocated individual leopards.
Now NCF is planning to organise bigger awareness programs and seminars with the local forest dept, local people, press and even politicians in the dist to help them handle these kind of situations better the next time around.
I started writing a comment and it developed into a post on its own….am posting it.
I am glad about the NCF initiative. Elevating the awareness level ought to help…..I hope so.
great initiative by NCF..
You can put up info if they need any volunteers for such initiatives.. may be some of us can do something.
-Sandeep
hey
pl get in touch with me on swapnali.das@gmail.com/ http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=546216521
hi kalyan … kindly add me as your friend plz in your friend list.
thanks
vivek
interesting
I have gone through ur blog and gallery as well.Really nice pics!Keep it up.
your earlier post about hte captured leopard had left me feeling frustrated… same with this one.