Buxa Tiger Reserve to get 50 sambar deer to ensure enough food for big cats

Kolkata: The Buxa Tiger Reserve (BTR) in Alipurduar district of North Bengal is all set to release 50 sambar deer to guarantee food for the Royal Bengal tigers in the reserve. The deer will be transported from Jaldapara National Park to BTR which is gearing up to introduce 12 Royal Bengal tigers in the reserve, to augment the tiger population there.

"We have been bringing in herbivores in phases from different wildlife sanctuaries to boost the food chain ahead of the introduction of the big cats in the BTR. The decision to release the sambar deer is a stride towards that direction," state Forest minister Binay Krishna Barman said. The BTR authorities have already released 335 deer in the reserve in three phases.

The tigers will be brought from the forest reserves in Assam, which have similar flora and fauna as the Buxa forest.

"The climatic conditions and the flora and fauna of Buxa match with that of Assam. We have already written to the Assam government for procuring a dozen tigers," a senior official of the state Forest department said.

It has been learnt that the department has consciously decided not to bring in tigers from the Sunderbans mangrove forest, as it has a completely different mangrove ecosystem and it would have been difficult for the animals to survive in the climatic condition at Buxa if they were brought from there.

Moreover, BTR is located close to Assam's Manas Tiger Reserve and some experts believe that animals from Manas often come to Buxa using Bhutan as a corridor.

Buxa is one of the three forests in India where the National Tiger Conservation Authority has approved the tiger augmentation programme. The BTR is home to smaller cats such as leopards which occasionally surface in the tea gardens nearby. There are also common clouded leopards, jungle cats and fishing cats. The herbivore list includes elephants, Indian gaur, chital, sambars, barking deer and hog deer.

The tiger reserve has an area of about 757.9 sq km, of which 390 sq km lies in the core area, with 367 sq km in the buffer zone.

The number of tigers in BTR has been often debated by wildlife enthusiasts. While Forest Department officials claimed there were tigers in the reserve, almost no sighting of the big cats raised questions about their presence. The survey of tigers in 2011 based on DNA analysis of scat put the number of tigers at 20.