Tigers in the Terai’s sugarcane fields are developing into an ecotype of their own: Rahul Shukla

The Atkona tigress on the Gurdwara wall is gawked at by the villagers. Picture supplied by Rahul Shukla

On the morning of December 26, 2023, residents of Atkona village in Uttar Pradesh’s Pilibhit district thronged close to the wall of an area Gurdwara. They gawked at a younger tigress, that was perching on the wall in full glare of the group.

The sight created fairly a spectacle and earlier than lengthy, the photographs from Atkona had been beamed throughout India and the world, making a sensation on social media. The tigress was ultimately rescued by the forest division after being tranquilised.

The Atkona incident shouldn’t be a one-off. Pilibhit is situated within the Terai, marshy lowlands that border the decrease foothills of the Himalayas. The Terai can finest be described as a transition zone between the Himalayan vary and Indo-Gangetic Plain.

In Uttar Pradesh, the Terai stretches from Saharanpur within the west to Kushinagar within the east. It additionally kinds the border between India and Nepal in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. In jap and northeastern India, the Terai is named the ‘Duars’ (from Sanskrit Dwara, which means ‘door’), as it’s the gateway to the Indo-Gangetic Plain.

The Terai is residence to a number of the tallest grasslands on the earth.

Down To Earth (DTE) needed to get to the again story behind the looks of the tigress in Atkona and a number of other related cases within the current previous.

DTE spoke to Rahul Shukla on the topic. Shukla wears quite a lot of hats. He has labored as a professor at Lucknow Christian School.

And it was again in 1997, when he was the wildlife warden of Dudhwa Tiger Reserve, that Shukla first observed the phenomenon of tigers making themselves at residence within the huge sugarcane fields of the Terai.

He has performed one of many world’s longest working private scientific research on tigers within the cane fields of the Terai. His analysis has appeared within the type of quite a lot of books: Sugarcane Tiger: the Phenomenon of Wildlife in Tarai Farmlands (2008), Tigers within the Lengthy Grass: My Hyperlink With Massive Cats in Sugarcane (2017) and Sugarcane Tigers Of Amaria: Becoming a member of The Dots With Rahul Shukla (2022).

Shukla is engaged on a brand new ebook about tigers within the Terai at present. Titled Maneaters after Jim Corbett, it is a complicated analysis on the phenomenon of maneating tigers within the farmlands of the Terai. 

It highlights that whereas Jim Corbett’s maneaters had been geriatric, injured by porcupine quills and disabled by damaged canines that compelled them to take up maneating as an choice, the brand new rising maneaters of the Terai are able-bodied and wholesome. These new maneaters have cancelled the paradigms set by Corbett on maneating. Shukla analyses the causes that compelled them to take to maneating. 

DTE caught up with Shukla and talked with in regards to the ‘sugarcane tigers’ of the Terai. Edited excerpts:

Rajat Ghai (RG): What are the ‘sugarcane tigers’ of the Terai? Do they represent a separate sort altogether, one thing just like the ‘swamp tigers’ of the Sundarbans or the ‘tigers of the snow’ within the Russian Far East?

Rahul Shukla (RS): No crop identified to people — apart from maize and sugarcane — grows greater than 4 ft in peak.

Seventy per cent of land within the Terai’s settlements is beneath sugarcane cultivation. One per cent is beneath maize. The rest is beneath pulses, greens and cereals.

One won’t discover wildlife within the Terai’s villages if it weren’t for sugarcane. That is very true for tigers that are shy, nocturnal and search cowl. Since every thing narrows all the way down to sugarcane, I take advantage of the time period ‘sugarcane tiger’.

These are very a lot Bengal tigers (Panthera tigris tigris) and never a separate subspecies.

The phenomenon of sugarcane tigers is restricted to the Terai forests. Tigers on this area normally go to settlements, keep within the cane fields after which return.

Nevertheless, there are some that discover the sugarcane conducive. These are principally from litters that had been born and introduced up within the cane fields. They’ve seen their moms looking within the fields and people working in them. They’ve seen how their moms don’t return to the forest through the harvest however moderately shift into one other patch of sugarcane.

Shukla (left) and Director-Normal of Uttar Pradesh Police, Vijay Kumar, on an expedition to rescue a maneater tiger in Behri village, Pilibhit district. Picture courtesy: Rahul Shukla

Apparently, a sugarcane area is rarely totally harvested. A sugarcane plant grows into maturity in 9 months. Throughout harvest, a 6-inch ratoon is left behind the place a brand new plant grows.

Therefore, if one crop is harvested in November and others are harvested in February, the tigress has sufficient house to maneuver for shelter. There is no such thing as a absolute pinch interval when the complete area is totally denuded and devoid of canopy.

Summers are normally cool within the Terai’s sugarcane fields because of synthetic irrigation. Moreover tigers, these fields are residence to all kinds of wildlife together with wild boar, jackals and nilgai. There are additionally feral cattle.

In different phrases, there isn’t any prey base shortfall within the Terai’s cane fields.

When one or two generations of tigers develop up in such an setting, a change in behaviour is seen within the subsequent era.

When tiger cubs develop in such a panorama, they will not acclamatise to the forest. Jungle prey species are cautious and hard for tigers to hunt. In a human-dominated panorama like a sugarcane area, a feral cow is weak, defenceless and has sufficient meat to maintain a tiger for a fortnight.

Tigers develop into naturalised to human-dominated landscapes as a result of they’re able to entry extra meals there than within the jungle.

One of these change is a putative pressure. When it emerges in an animal, it makes a jungle tiger a ‘farmland tiger’, a separate ecotype. 

RG: Is the settlement of refugees from Pakistan within the Terai through the Fifties liable for creating the phenomenon of the ‘sugarcane tigers’?

RS: Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel needed to rehabilitate the refugees from Pakistan in Jammu and Kashmir for strategic causes. However Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was in opposition to the thought. He requested the then Chief Minister of the erstwhile United Provinces and the primary Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Govind Ballabh Pant to settle the refugees within the Terai.

Within the preliminary phases of settlement, the (principally Sikh) refugees purchased nice chunks of land from native landowners at throwaway costs. Many Sikh farmers thus personal large tracts of land. They’ve additionally managed to carry on to those land parcels regardless of land sealing legal guidelines.

Since sugarcane is a extremely popular money crop, there are greater than 3,000 crushers and over 200 sugar mills within the Terai.

Most of the refugee-owned farms are over 100 acres in dimension and resemble the large Terai grasslands they changed. Tigers simply discover shelter in these inviolate, undisturbed areas, well-irrigated by water channels.

In 1997, a tigress killed a feral cow in Kalupurwa village close to Dudhwa Tiger Reserve. The locals poisoned the carcass. The tigress and her 4 subadult cubs consumed it and died.

It led to an uproar. The then governor of Uttar Pradesh, Romesh Bhandari, referred to as a gathering of the Tiger Safety Cell that he chaired and I used to be part of.

I attended the assembly. I mooted an concept that the house owners of farms that had been residence to tigers ought to be made ‘tiger guardians’. They need to be given a certificates and recognition and will shield the tigers on their farm.

The concept appealed to Bhandari and he requested it to be applied. Eighteen guardians had been subsequently appointed. It was a win-win scenario for each, people and tigers.

I keep in mind assembly a Sikh farmer, Gurdial Singh Nagra, who mentioned he had develop into a ‘grandfather’ and the tigress that had birthed a litter on his farm was his personal daughter. He additionally thanked me for beginning the scheme. It was the most effective praise I’ve acquired to this point.

RG: Related cases of leopards breeding in sugarcane fields has been seen in south Gujarat and Maharahtra’s sugar belt. Sugarcane fields being a house for wildlife is then not restricted to tigers alone, proper?

RS: True, sugarcane crops are cultivated throughout India. And sure, they do entice different wildlife together with sympatric predators equivalent to leopards.

However the phenomenon of ‘sugarcane tigers’ is a singular one. One can not evaluate a leopard and a tiger right here. The leopard, though a powerful animal, is in spite of everything a smaller cat than a tiger. Additionally it is extremely adaptable and might dwell off meals waste generated by human settlements in addition to animals that dwell close to them equivalent to free-ranging canines. Additionally it is arboreal and has a a lot wider prey base than a tiger, as it may survive on smaller prey.

A tiger, however, is a ‘mega predator’. An grownup tiger can devour 40 kilograms of meat in a single sitting.

{That a} human-dominated panorama such because the Terai cane fields can help tigers and they’re normally left unmolested is what makes this phenomenon distinctive.

RG: The cases of those tigers showing in habitations throughout the Terai is rising. What coverage measures ought to wildlife planners and conservationists take so that there’s minimal battle?

Acknowledge ‘tiger guardians’. Defend forests. Additionally keep in mind that the Indian religio-cultural ethos is critical. All animals discover a house in our perception system and spirituality. The survival of wildlife in farmlands is straightforward due to our non secular ethos. Therefore, the phenomenon of ‘sugarcane tigers’ will endure.

Could also be such farms may also be opened to tourism. After all, with authorized permission.