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Wild Mischief of Katarnia Ghats “Unheeded Biography of a Tiger”

A heartbreaking story of annihilation of honor and nobility of a Tiger across the borders of Nepal and Uttar Pradesh in Lakhimpur Kheeri in Katarnia Ghats, being driven into a vicious circle of man and animal conflict. A tiger struggling hard to survive, a wild cat caught in the web of man’s muddle of hodgepodge. A king being declared a marauder of his own subject… A K Singh I happen to be the Tiger of Katarina Ghats. Tree stands of Sal, Terminalia, Ficus and Shisham watch over trails of my pugmarks every day. They are the guardians of my lost will and renewed conscience. Unbeaten treks of my trails disappear into the thickets of bhabar grassy patch of low alluvial savanna woodlands of aegle-khair-sissoo forests, wrinkled with jamun and gutel, creased with phragmites and arundo grasses. As of now, I am reduced to being one of the most bemused, befuddled and bewildered king of this jungle. I live and work under the generous but highly principled supervision of the shrubs, bushes and trees of Katarnia ghat woods. As the monsoon sets in, broad leaves become fresh green in cloudy sunlight. Upland waterlogged plains run away at a sharp angle into the ravines of Girva river. As the water dwindles, sandy dunes emerge in islands and embankments of the river. Solitary Crocodile and congregation of Gharials can be seen altogether basking in the sun the whole day unperturbed, unruffled and unconcerned of the folly of humans in the surroundings. Pintail ducks, goose, jacana, coots, storks play with waves of meandering current of lazy waters. Kingfisher swinging on long shoot of Imperata grass keeps tweaking kila kila warning his friend birds about impinging danger from fishing cat. Crested serpent eagle and white rumped vultures keep waiting to grab their bait perching in remote corner of high canopy on ficus tree witnessing the scene of pouncing upon aquatic denizens. Herds of cheetal, sambhar and some

blue bulls browsing under the canopy of teak, terminalia and gutel unheeded remain busy in their routine search of food as I move along the way of herbivores. Seasonal floods of monsoon rains in Girva river

restrict my roaming amidst hundreds of waterlogged phanta where I need to travel through upland grasslands of sacchurm, imepreata and desmostachia. Walking within dry grasslands planted with teak, shisham, semal and

eucalyptus often fetches me with plenty of foods in swamp deer and blue bulls. Just as there is honor and morality among men, so there is solidarity, harmony, camaraderie among plant and animals. As men fear death, as children fear to go in dark so are the wild animals like me scared to encroach upon human territory. Over the last one decade wild beasts of Katarnia Ghats like me and leopards have gone crazy, unbridled and scary. I quite often fill with

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outburst of tantrums, listening to the news that femur bone of one of the leopards was found broken and neck of another leopard was found fractured by some poachers of Daulatpur village. Revenge is a kind of wild justice man is prone to wrangle and more ought law to weed it out. Its traumatic and painful to hear the revenge of this kind. Recently a 10 year boy was attacked in Kukrigava by leopard. Big cats like me have started straying out of the forests during midnight too. This is alteration of my behavior, a deviation from being normal. Leopards were reported to have been hiding inside bushes and two young girls in Sujauli village were injured. A leopard was beaten to death by lathi charge a month back. Last time a young girl caught the attention of a leopard and she was mauled to severe injury. It is shocking to learn that in Uttarakhand, during the past 10 years over 722 leopards, 81 tigers and 241 elephants have been reported dead due to unnatural means. On the other hand, leopards, tigers and elephants have collectively killed 338 human lives and injured 460 during the same period. It is pathetically tragic and catastrophically disastrous. It is awfully terrible and abysmally horrifying. This has never happened in the history of this sub tropical Indian subcontinent. I have no rivalry with human, I have no enmity with man, his cattle, his live stock and his paraphernalia. He is setting fire on my last frontier forests of old natural growth. He is destroying my shelter, obliterating my food and nutrition, demolishing my last asylum in this sanctuary of wilderness. I feel proud to have lived in the foothills of Himalaya amidst luxuriant wild population of elephants, rhinos, deer, sloth bear, hog deer and blue bulls connected via a corridor from Rajaji

National Park, Corbett Tiger Reserve, Dudhwa, Valmiki Tiger Reserve and Bardia National Park. But since almost last four decades my connectivity to these earlier contiguous bio geographic provinces has been coming under question. I can not move freely on the wild-life-corridors as these have been diverted for agricultural cultivation, seed farm propagation and other purposes. While crossing through, I often fall on the farmers sugar cane fields or paddy farms. There seems to be no country for old man like me. So called habitat fragmentation and infestation of invasive species have broken my linkages and relations to other provinces. Increased human population, life style change of

gujjars, muslims, tharu and gonds of their livestock over grazing, over cutting of firewood, timber and fodder has started eroding my shelter of relief. Railway networks and roadways traffic congestion cause havoc to my free movement and other mega mammals. Upcoming Hydro electric power lines, irrigation projects, sand and boulder mining in river beds have been causing fragmentation of my inviolate pristine uninterrupted zone of undertaking. In Katarnia ghats more than 20% area is infested by Lantana due to over grazing and fire incidences. Increasing dominance of undesirable succession in grasslands and weed proliferation has caused late successional regression of nonpalatable Tiliacora acuminate, Helicteres isora, Cassia

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tora and Ageratum conyzoides to increase considerably. Since 1975, with pronouncement of Tiger reserve, I breath a sigh of relief, to have been connected between Dudhwa, Bardia and Kishanpur sanctuary. I feel proud to be ruling over number of endangered species of rhino, dolphins, gharials, crocodiles, swamp deer, hispid hare, Bengal floricans and variety of vultures. Katarnia ghat became a unique and outstandingly world famous for its sympatric population of crocodiles and ghariyals together with dolphins living in harmony in girva river. Now this area has been declared as no disturbance zone, for helping the breeding cats. This area shall be emptied, made inviolate, which is inhabited by more than a dozen of villages as of now. Over the years agricultural expansion, livestock depredation and excessive dependence on forests of Katarnia Ghats has shrunken the forests, fragmented the habitat and wrecked the genuine shelter of all those animals who had been living in wild in peaceful harmony with nature. Love is a matter of comedies than that of tragedies. Life begets much mischiefs, some times like rage, some time like frenzy and other time like fury. In this decade almost hundreds of people were killed and more were injured by number of feline attacks under the ferocity and vehemence of raging wild cats. Obviously such cases can not be called as chance encounters. Although habitat fragmentation is widely regarded as a major threat of our survival and sustenance but little is known about the immediate mechanism on population response to fragmentation. No body knows about meta

population dynamics of carnivores, exchange rate of viable populations of this bio-geographic province. Lesser is known about small scale fragmentation and patchy population and the changed behavior of felines, altered habits of ungulates and tainted patterns of conduct of antelopes. Natural growth and dispersal rate of sparse population and their social organization remain largely unknown. Few years back government made special tiger corridors in a bid to save big cats, all of sudden a dead tigress was

found near Gerva river. Injury marks on her head and claws declared it a furious fight among wild cats. Very less people except

scientists know about an ecological network, a set of the biotic interactions in an ecosystem. Each

species connects by pairwise interactions. Species competes, evolves and disperses simply for the purpose of seeking resources to sustain her struggle for her very existence. Some times they take form of resource consumers, some times as plant herbivores and other time as host-parasite-interactions. In 1926, Alfred Lotka and Vito Volterra, a famous mathematician proposed a differential equation model to explain the prey predator relationship. A pair of differential equations describes predator prey dynamics. It is characterized by oscillations in the population size of both predator and prey, with the peak of the predator’s oscillation lagging slightly behind the peak of the prey’s oscillation. Most of the time various solutions of prey predator relation models show oscillatory nature of the population of the two species in a state of dynamic

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equilibrium even though there are very few preys. In the study of dynamics of single population, natural growth rate of the species and the carrying capacity of the environment is considered for long term sustenance. This model makes assumptions that the prey population will grow exponentially when the predator is absent, the predator population will starve in the absence of the prey population (sometimes switching to another type of prey), predators can consume infinite quantities of prey and there is no environmental complexity. Here in Katarnia Ghat I don’t feel any dearth of natural resource abundance. I find herbivore base stronger than any other place like Bardia, Dudhwa and Kishanpur. Chitwan, Katarina Ghat, flanked by rivers, ample number of big water reservoirs, is a forest ecosystem, par excellent for sustenance of 6 to 7 tigers per 100 sq Km on long term basis. If the prey density is some how maintained within the Katarina Ghats I need not have to starve, famish and depredate any where. If the quality of forests is improved a bit with upgrading of habitat and accentuation of herbivores, if the boundaries of pristine wilderness get recognition, if across the margins of forests, clash of interactions are lessened, if across the edges of forests, cobwebs of relations are enriched, then in no time the healthy equation of the wilderness shall start prevailing. There is a strong and healthy bond of

relationship between man and animal across all the frontiers of forests. Bond of love, care,

concern and kind heartedness. It flows from both sides with mutual respect, regard and admiration. Such bond of relationship between man and animal is quite old, as old as earth, as strong as rock of Gibraltar, as robust and resilient as claws of the tiger or sharp wit of human. A

heavenly connection of affiliation, an ecological relationship need to be developed from both the sides so as to repair and build the broken linkages of ecological setting so as to seal the inoperative set of ecosystem services, so as to set an equilibrium of population dynamics between man and wild animals.

A K Singh is the member of Indian Forest Service 1997 serving in the Ministry of Forest, Ecology and Environment of the Government of Karnataka. Views

portrayed here are personal which are expressed in the wake of references cited hereinafter. Contact: 9481180956. aksinghifs@gmail.com

20.09.2015 References: 1. Fahring L Merriam G 1994. Conservation of Fragmented

Populations. Conservation Biology. 2. Foster J and Gains MS 1992. The effects of a successional

habitat mosaic on a small mammal community. Ecology. 3. Gadgli, M and Guha R 1992. The Fissured Land:An

Ecological History of India. Oxford University Press. New Delhi.

4. Hanski I and Gilpin M 1996, Metapopulation Biology, Ecology, Genetics, and Evolution. Academic Press. London UK.

5. Harris L D 1984. The Fragmented Forest: Island Biogeography. Theory and Preservation of Biotic Diversity Chicago and London. National Academy Press.

6. Harrison S 1991. Local extinction in a meta population context: an empirical evaluation. Biological Journal of the Lennean Society.

7. Ims R A 1995. Movement Patterns in relation to landscape structures. Mosaic landscapes and ecological processes.

8. Johnsingh AJT, Qureshi, Goyal, Rawat,2004 Conservation Status of Tiger and Associated Species in Terai Arc Landscape of India. Wild Life Institute of India.