Hilly terrain making it difficult to track tigress
Times of India | 24 December 2024
Kolkata/Purulia/Jhargram: The satellite collar of Odisha tigress Zeenat stopped transmitting signals after early on Monday. While the latest signals on Monday night showed the big cat was near the Bankura south border, experts said there was no problem in signal collection by the gadget but the undulated terrain is delaying transmission of data, posing challenges to the tracking teams.
K Ramesh from Wildlife Institute of India said, "On a hilly, undulated terrain, it can go without signals for hours even though it collects the same. The moment the network is available it starts transmitting all the collected GPS locations," said Ramesh.
According to chief conservator of forest (south western circle) Bidyut Sarkar, the satellite collar of Zeenat is emitting signals on and off. "It's possible that the big cat is either hiding or taking rest inside a cave or under a rock from where it's difficult to get continuous signals," he added.
DFO Anjan Guha said that till Monday evening, Zeenat's location was the same as it was on Sunday night and that it moved barely a little over a kilometre. WWF-India's Aritra Kshettry, who was involved in a number of projects of radio collaring of elephants in Bengal, too, said "It can transmit signal data through GSM, which is like a SIM card of mobile, or directly through satellite. In both cases, poor network due to hilly terrains will stop the gadget from emitting signals."
Y V Jhala, a scientist who was involved in radio collaring projects of big cats in India, said, "If the antenna part of the collar is facing downwards then it might face problems in emitting signals."
Similipal Tiger Reserve field director Prakash Gogineni refused to divulge the tigress's locations and said it was safe. "We will either tranquillize or capture it."
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