PUGMARKS ARE DISAPPEARING IN MUKUNDRA

There were four big cats in all, two males, two females, three of them translocated, one an interloper, who had wandered 150 km to find this range

- Rohit Parihar

. It seemed like everything was in place for Mukundra Tiger Reserve (MTR), India’s newest, launched just two years back near Kota in Rajasthan. All four adult tigers were from the Ranthambore National Park, and they had arrived in the one-year period between April 2018 and April 2019. And with both females, named MT-2 and MT-4, having cubs around May-June this year, officials were almost ready to call it another big cat success story for India.

Almost, for it all went downhill very fast. In the last 10 days of July, the park lost two of the four adult tigers (MT-2 and MT-3, the male who had wandered in), a cub was killed, while another, rescued in critical condition, died on August 17. Also, MT-4 and the newborns, caught on a trip camera in May, seem to have gone missing. “The deaths are a big setback…we’ll have to rethink our strategy for the park,” says a top officer of the Rajasthan forest and wildlife department.