Kids elated to spot tiger in their backyard inside Sajnekhali Wildlife Sanctuary
Telegraph | 6 January 2025
First came a monitor lizard that ran for its life. Seconds later, a deer mom and her fawn did an encore. Cue enough for a forest guide on a watchtower to alert a group of visitors.
For the next 10 minutes, the group, comprising 30 school students, were mesmerised by a full-grown adult male tiger who roamed around a fenced watchtower inside the Sajnekhali Wildlife Sanctuary in the Sunderbans.
The January 2 sighting was the first time most of the students in the group saw a tiger in the wild. They came from villages on the fringes of the Sundarban Tiger Reserve.
Despite being sons and daughters of the soil, they are not familiar with the rich biodiversity of the mangrove forests, said the founder of an environmental organisation that organised the forest trip.
“They live here but hardly have enough opportunities to get acquainted with the rich biodiversity they have inherited by birth. Their schools hardly organise educational excursions. Tourism is big in the Sunderbans. But it draws mostly outsiders. There are some local families linked to the tourism industry. But children, in general, do not get the exposure to the forests they deserve,” said Joydip Kundu, the founder of the Society for Heritage and Ecological Research (SHER), an NGO that works to reduce human-wildlife conflict.
On the second day of the new year, the NGO organised an excursion for 30 young boys and girls, students of Classes IX, X, and XI. They came from villages such as Pakhiralaya, Dayapur, Rangabelia and Rajatjubilee.
They toured the Sajnekhali Wildlife Sanctuary — one of the four ranges of the STR — on a boat before getting off at the Sudhanyakhali watchtower. Minutes after reaching the top, Nityananda Choukidar, a veteran forest guide, signalled the group to be silent.
He was alerted by the monitor lizard and the deer mom and fawn. Soon after, glimpses of the yellow coat and back stripes were visible inside a thicket. Moments later, around 3.40pm, the apex predator emerged from the green cover.
“It was a majestic sight. The tiger looked at us and stayed put. It crossed the observation line (a patch of the forest outside the fenced watchtower area that has been cleared for good sighting) and roamed around for 10 minutes before retreating into the deep forest. Basking in the sunlight, the tiger was in all its glory,” said Kundu.
Soumili Mondal, a Class X student at Dayapur PC Sen High School, was elated. “I cannot describe the feeling in words. I felt proud as a resident of the Sunderbans,” she said.
The January 2 trip was the first of a series of nature-orientation programmes that SHER has lined up for the teenagers. They are part of Bagh Sankalp, an ongoing conservation awareness campaign run by the NGO — in collaboration with the HT Parekh Foundation and Sanctuary Nature Foundation — to strengthen the community’s pledge to save the Sunderbans tiger.
The trip included a stop at the Sajnekhali Range Office of the STR. A couple of forest officers interacted with the students, telling them about the tiger census and forest patrolling.
On the boat, each participant got a booklet on the major mangrove species and animals — tigers, crocodiles, fishing cats and monitor lizards — in the Sunderbans.