Kolkata: The tigress recently released in north Bengal’s Buxa Tiger Reserve has been spotted roaming in a village in the western range of Assam’s Raimona National Park. The tigress, brought from Bihar’s Valmiki Tiger Reserve, killed a domestic pig in Rajendrapur village on Sunday night, said sources.The three-year-old tigress, BTR-TF1, crossed the Sankosh river and a road near Gosaigaon in Assam to move to Raimona. TOI on Oct 25 had reported about the tigress’s movement towards Raimona. Forest department teams from Bengal and Assam are monitoring its movements, a senior Bengal forest official said on Monday.Tranquillisation will be considered if the tigress moves towards human habitation, said official sources. Else, the animal will be allowed to continue moving. “If it moves deeper into human habitation, faces hard boundaries or gets stuck, it will be brought back,” a senior scientist with the Wildlife Institute of India said.Speaking on this, Bengal forest minister Manoj Oraon said, “Our team has reached Assam. We are monitoring the tigress and its movement. Decision to tranquillise it will be need-based. If it ventures near human settlements adjoining the Assam forest, we might take a call. As of now, we are allowing it to move freely.”A Bengal forest official said the tigress’s movement should be viewed in the context of a broader tiger augmentation programme aimed at rewilding the entire landscape across northern Bengal and adjoining Assam, rather than treating Buxa, Jaldapara and Raimona as isolated habitats.A senior National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) official said the decision to bring the tigress back to Buxa would be need-based. Unlike Similipal tigress Zeenat, which moved into areas that had no tiger presence, the Buxa tigress is moving through tiger-bearing habitats along historical corridors linking Buxa with Assam’s Manas and Raimona, and Bhutan’s Phibsoo Wildlife Sanctuary.Probeswar Basumatary, general secretary of Raimona Golden Langur Eco-tourism Society, said the tigress made the kill around 5 km from Raimona National Park. “Despite presence of tigers in Raimona, this is the first time in recent times that we have seen a tiger near a village here. The collar around its neck indicated that it might have come from elsewhere. We immediately alerted foresters on Sunday night,” he added.According to the local alert, Rajendrapur villagers had urged the Assam forest department to capture the tigress and send her back to Buxa. A social media post also appealed to residents not to approach or chase the animal, keep children and livestock indoors at night, and inform forest officials immediately.However, the experience of Odisha’s Satkosia Tiger Reserve, where India’s first interstate tiger translocation project was launched in 2018, offers a cautionary lesson. The initiative faltered after a relocated male tiger died in a suspected poaching incident, while the female was implicated in the deaths of two people and eventually sent back to MP in 2021.
