Trapping To Protect

The Camera as a Conservation Tool.

- Dr. Anish Andheria

It was early August 2015, and I boarded a flight to Nagpur to have a one-on-one with the Honorable Chief Minister (CM) of Maharashtra about the importance of having wildlife underpasses in strategic locations on the National Highway -7 (NH-7) that was on the verge of being upgraded from two to four lanes and in the process permanently severing the corridor between Pench and other tiger-bearing areas to the east such as Navegaon-Nagzira and Kanha. In my meeting with the CM, instead of getting into an emotional rant on how wildlife was being short chained by development, I chose to share the scientific findings from our longterm tiger monitoring exercise in the greater Pench landscape that included both Pench Tiger Reserves and corridors that connect Pench to other Protected Areas (PAs). Our data comprising camera-trapped tiger images unambiguously showed that even in its existing state, NH-7 was acting as a barrier for the movement of tigers and their prey. When I showed him the Minimum Convex Polygons plotted for every resident tiger of that landscape, he was taken aback to see that barring a couple of adult male tigers, no other individual was using both sides of NH-7. It took him less than a couple of seconds to decipher that disturbance created by vehicular traffic on the existing two-lane highway was restricting free movement of tigers, and within no time I had his word that he will personally ensure that adequate number and length of mitigation structures will be provided when four laning process starts.