Friday, January 24, 2014

Tigers spotted in Dewas

Bagish K Jha,TNN | Jan 24, 2014

INDORE: Tigers seem to have found new territory in forest areas of Dewas, which has no past history of striped big cats' presence. Two days after finding pugmarks of tigers on Wednesday, forest official spotted 2 tigers walking at a close distance in Uday Nagar forest area. The presence of tiger in non-reserved area has brought joy to the department, heightening expectations that overall population of big cats in the city would go up.

On Wednesday,at 8.35 am, Uday Nagar range officer along with his staff were taking round in the forest area when 2 tigers were spotted in forest compartment 688 from a distance of around 50 metres. Tigers were spotted walking one after another at a distance of around 20 metre in between.

Right now, the forest department is carrying out wild animal census from January 20 and will continue till January 27. On the first day of census work, pugmarks of two tigers were spotted in Uday Nagar and Rang Bagli areas of Dewas forest range.

Chief conservator of forest (CCF) of Ujjian P C Dubey said a special team is formed to gather more evidence of tiger. Today, forest official took a picture of tiger from their mobile camera, but the picture quality was bad. So now we have given good cameras to our team to take picture of tigers.

Elaborating, he said team has been instructed to keep an eye on water bodies of the area. He said villagers have been reporting about the presence of tiger in these areas for the past few months and killing of around 8 to 10 animals have been reported in last few months. Some time ago, a buffalo was killed and dragged to a hill, which could have been possibly done by tiger.

Dubey said Dewas forest range has good forest with sufficient pray base to support tiger population. The forest range has 33 water bodies. Of these, water lasts in 23 till June after the forest department carried out the development.

source

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