How can you study an animal you cannot see? How can you manage an unseen population?
Most of the time in Sundarbans you cannot see the tiger. Neither can you see the gods or the wind, but you can see what they have touched. And for many years, this was what the West Bengal Forest Department relied upon: in attempting to trace the outlines of the tiger’s mystery, the men looked for impressions in the mud.
Until 2007, the tiger census, conducted once every two years at each of India’s twenty-one tiger reserves, was based on the premise that every tiger’s footprint is as individual as a human fingerprint. Shikaris used this method to track individual man- eaters. Expanding on the idea, India’s tiger experts developed a way to identify and therefore count each individual. From these tracks Indian officials, like palmists, tried to trace the fates of the country’s tigers since the creation of the network of tiger reserves in 1972.
Almost all of the 130 people on the staff of India’s Sundarbans Tiger Reserve—officers, forest guards, cooks, orderlies—were involved in the census.
They traveled in 100-foot launches like Monorama, with its powerful forty-horsepower engine and tall, whip-like radio antenna and porcelain sink; they took smaller boats with names like J’ai Guru, powered by ten-horsepower all-purpose generators; they used dinghies and motor boats; even the Forest Department’s eighteen houseboats, on which the patrolling staff lived in squalid good humor, set sail.
There was an air of gaiety as the enumerators and their support staff left for the thirty-seven field recording camps where they would work for six days. One hundred or so volunteers were recruited to help count the tigers; extra boatmen were hired from Sundarbans villages to ferry the 250 enumerators to their work sites. Aboard the boats each night there would be long lamp-lit card games, country liquor, and laughter.
Each team of five or six enumerators left the boat at ebb tide, when the widest swath of land was exposed. Each was equipped with a set of two rectangular clear glass plates, 20 by 25 centimeters, held together by screws at the corners; a felt-tip pen; a one-meter steel tape; paper; and two rubber bands. This comprised the Tiger Tracer, with which they would attempt to identify every unseen tiger in the reserve’s 998 square miles.
Seven months after the December 1992 census was conducted, the Forest Department released the figures to the state minister for environment and forests. It reported 251 tigers in the Indian Sundarbans. In the 613 paw-print tracings collected, they counted 92 individual tigers, 132 tigresses, and 27 cubs.
For years, these census figures were credited with such precision that even small changes were scrutinized. Compared with the figures released two years before, the 1992 census reported a decrease of 18 animals. ‘Only 250 tigers left in the Sundarbans,’ headlined the Calcutta Telegraph. (The article also reported that 295 tigers had been counted in 1988, and only 196 in 1990—a decrease that should have been far greater cause for alarm. The Forest Department’s figures were actually 265 in 1988 and 269 in 1990.) But Rathin, then a sixteen-year veteran of government service, was ready for that. The report he prepared for the ministry assured them the decrease was merely an artifact of previous, less accurate estimates. ‘However, this estimate,’ he wrote, ‘has a definite aura of authenticity.’
In the dry dust along a dirt road you can learn in a few hours to tell the sex of a tiger who has recently passed by: the print of the male’s hind foot is squarer than that of the female; his four toes are also shorter and blunter. At parks like Kanha and Ranthambhore fresh pugmarks are etched into the dust along the roads with the precision a detective would wish for in dusting for fingerprints. (Tigers seem to like traveling on roads.) Often there are other characteristics that help distinguish one individual’s pugmarks from another’s. At Chitwan one tigress’s distinctive prints earned her the name Chuchchi, or ‘Pointed Toes’. The shape of the three lobes of the paw pad, too, may be unique. Where the lobes join, two conically tapering valleys in the pad leave ridges in the dirt.A good, clear print in light dust will show very well defined tips of these ridges in the bottom line of the pugmark.
On my second trip to India I met Raghu Chundawat, an instructor with the prestigious Wildlife Institute of India. He was teaching the Tiger Tracer technique to park staffers around the country. I met Raghu at Ranthambhore, a spectacular tiger reserve in Rajasthan, gathered around the remains of a thousand- year-old fort and necklaced with lakes. Here the young, moustached teacher was instructing park research officers in the fine points of identifying individual tracks.
‘You must pick your pugmarks carefully,’ he advised as he leaned over a four-toed impression in the dust. ‘Only a perfect print will do. ’He stressed how you must place the glass Tiger Tracer right on top of the print. You must position your eyes and your pen directly over the portion you are tracing—otherwise parallax error will grossly distort the outline. You must be wary of glare and shadow. You must pay particular attention when tracing the flat edge of the top of the pad, the pad’s lobes, the tips of the toes.
There were, in fact, more than a dozen ‘parameters’ considered ‘diagnostic’ of an individual print, but can cause a pugmark to twist or splay. Wet ground will grossly enlarge a print; claw marks, as the cat tries to gain purchase on slippery ground, further distort it. ‘For instance,’ he continued, ‘this pugmark here’—it was decidedly smaller than the prints headed in the opposite direction along the road, which we had identified as belonging to an adult tiger. ‘Is this a female or a cub?’ Raghu asked. The heel impression indicated the animal had a problem with its feet, causing it to place more weight on the outside of the heel— but as we followed the track we saw that this was not consistent.
‘These kinds of individuals create confusion,’ he said, tracing the footprint onto paper. So, I asked, how do you resolve the confusion? How can you identify this individual if the pugmarks aren’t consistent? ‘This,’ he answered, ‘is the art.’
Even under ideal conditions, reading the subtleties of the tiger’s paw is difficult. At a normal walking pace on hard ground, a tiger places its hind paw exactly where the front paw of the same side has just trod, creating a double print. Tracking tigers at Ranthambhore, Harsh Vardan and T. K. Bapna claimed that a tiger ‘may leave pugmarks of differing size and style as he or she may walk in a different mood, to chase a prey or to hide itself.’
Was the Tiger Tracer’s art reliable enough to produce an accurate count of individuals? Many researchers have doubted this for quite some time. The Smithsonian research team at Chitwan concluded ‘it was not usually possible to relate tracks to specific individuals except in cases [such as Chuchchi’s] where the animal had an unusual track pattern.’ Often they would find no tracks from a tiger that their radio telemetry told them was in fact quite nearby. The method was not used for the nationwide tiger census in 2007.
Even earlier, though, at many of India’s tiger parks, officials used the Tiger Tracer only as a supplement to other methods. Researchers assumed that over three days of round the clock watches in the dry season, every tiger in a given reserve would come to drink at a waterhole. At some parks, like Kanha and Ranthambhore, researchers claimed to know every tiger on sight by their individual cheek stripes.
But in Sundarbans the enumerators relied on prints alone. And in the sloppy, slushy silt, most pugmarks look like formless holes punched in the mud.
Excerpted with permission from Spell of the Tiger: The Man-eaters of Sundarbans, written by Sy Montgomery, published by Aleph Book Company. Pages: 304 Price: Rs 222
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