News from the field 63 – February 2010

These last few months have been packed with work, so much so that it has been impossible up until now to find time to update this website. So here is some extended news for all you Sundarbans tiger people.

Dead tiger
In the early hours of 22nd January a tiger was discovered several kilometres into a village in Satkhira. The WTB team were asked by the FD and a local politician to help so we came from Dhaka to Satkhira by road as fast as we could. Coincidently we had with us Dr. John Lewis of Wildlife Vets International, who had just arrived that day to help direct a workshop. We thought that if we could reach there in time we may have been able to help the FD immobilise the tiger and transport it to back to the relative safety of the forest. The WTB-FD Tiger Response Team were on the sight early on and helped keep everything quiet while the FD staff arrived, together with some Bangladesh Rifles staff (BDR). Normally in these types of situations the tiger is killed very quickly but the FD, BDR, and local politician were able to coordinate the villagers so that the tiger remained safe for over 12 hours. Unfortunately as the day progressed the crowd swelled too many thousands and tensions built on all sides as the tiger sheltered in a village hut. Near sundown the situation became overwhelming for the authorities and the tiger was beaten to death by the crowd.



The crowd came from nearby villages but also from many kilometres away, and the village at the centre of things suffered theft and some damage to buildings from the visitors. The WTB team arrived an hour and a half too late. We examined the body and estimated, from the tooth wear, that the tiger was about 4-5 year old (basically in the prime of life). The tiger was female and appeared well fed and otherwise uninjured apart from the blows received from the villagers. It was sad indeed to see such a great animal’s life wasted. There were several lessons learnt from this incident; that the authorities can control the situation for a certain number of hours, but that they need specialist skills available to immobilize tigers so that be taken away from danger.

Immobilisation workshop
The FD and WTB conducted a workshop for FD staff on wild animal capture and immobilisation, at the FD’s safari park at Cox’s Bazaar. The workshop was first inaugurated during a meeting at the FD offices in Dhaka, by the Minister (MoEF), Secretary (MoEF), Chief Conservator of Forests, the Conservator of Forests (Wildlife Circle), and Professor Anwarul Islam (WTB).



The lead instructor was Dr. John Lewis, an experienced wildlife vet with specialisation in felids. The three day workshop covered overviews of animal capture techniques, anaesthesia techniques, and scenario planning. There were 30 participants; many from the Sundarbans but also some FD Wildlife staff from other areas. This workshop is one of many steps the FD and WTB are taking to help reduce tiger human conflict in the Sundarbans. More, time, planning, resources and work are needed to make a big impact on this serious issue.



Team building
Having helped the Forest Department (FD) formulate the first ever Bangladesh Tiger Action Plan (BTAP), the Wildlife Trust of Bangladesh is all too aware of the huge task ahead of us if we are going to secure the future of tigers in the country for generations to come. Small scale efforts just won’t work; the size of the challenge means that we have to all join forces from the village to the policy makers if we are going to make any significant change for the better. WTB is keen to build up in-country capacity for tiger conservation so have recently hired seven new staff, with support from Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). The new staff are helping managing WTB’s tiger project, developing tiger-human conflict mitigation actions, and building up a new education and awareness campaign. The new staff bring skills is journalism, marketing, project management, animal health, website design, forestry, and zoology; complementing the broad range of skills needed for tiger conservation.

Improving forest protection
An important objective of the BTAP is to improve protection of the Sundarbans, and the European Union have a project to do just that: The Sundarbans Environment And Livelihood Security (SEALS) project. As part of this project, WTB was commissioned by the EU to help the FD plan improvements for forest protection. To do this WTB and FD conducted a survey to catalogue the current state of protection, and then conducted a series of workshops to formulate a plan for future protection. The survey of current state involved visiting each and every guard post in the Sundarbans and making an exhaustive list of facilities, staff, and patrolling effort. If the survey was a physical marathon then the workshops were a mental one, but despite the long days, the FD staff were keen to put in the extra hours to ensure that the final plan was a good one.

Hill tracts survey
The BTAP notes the importance of evaluating the potential of the Chittagong Hill Tracts for future tiger conservation. There were tigers in this area before but there have been no verifiable reports of tiger presence in the last two decades. The chances of tigers still living in this area are probably low but we must have a look to be sure, because it would be a tragedy if there were tigers still in the hill tracts but we weren’t doing anything to save them. Even if there aren’t tigers in the hill tracts at the moment there is in any case the potential to restore the forest and tiger prey – and there may be still tigers in the adjoining forests in India and Myanmar that may repopulate the area. Wild dreams perhaps but not impossible. WTB will survey the area over the next year and a half; Suprio Chakma, a native of the area will build a team of local trackers to check the remaining forest for tiger and tiger prey. Many weeks of hard field work await Suprio and his team; updates of his progress will be posted each month on this web site.

Prioritising conservation actions
Md. Aziz (Assistant Professor at Jehanginagar University, and WTB staff) completed a paper that outlines the threats to tigers in the Sundarbans and the relative rank of each threat based on their estimated impact. The paper was submitted and presented at an environmental conference in Dhaka organised by BAPA. This document will now go through further revisions and reviews before finalisation and use to prioritise actions in the BTAP. If this bit of work sounds a bit dry, on the face of it that’s true, but without planning what to do and in what order is one of the biggest risks to the tigers.

Paper on climate change
WTB also helped author a WWF lead paper that modelled the possible future effects of sea level rise on the Sundarbans and its tiger population. The analysis used high resolution elevation maps and ranges of predicted sea level rise to help improve understanding of this threat to tigers. On the face of it the results look pretty grim: a potential major loss of tiger habitat in the next 70 years. However, the paper was clear to point out that there are other factors that may also effect loss of tiger habitat through inundation; siltation, tectonic shift, and mangrove adaptation. At ground level, new land is being accreted (gained), rather than lost overall along the Bangladesh coast and in the Sundarbans new islands are building up and water channels appear to becoming shallower instead of deeper. However, the take home message of this paper is that sea-level rise is a major threat which needs mitigation now, rather than waiting to see what happens before we act. The paper is available from: Link

Adam Barlow and Christina Greenwood
Wildlife Trust of Bangladesh
Dhaka