A male tiger entered a house in Silli in Jharkhand’s Ranchi district close to the state’s border with West Bengal early on June 25. It was rescued and released in the Palamu Tiger Reserve.
According to Jharkhand forest officials, the tiger is believed to have entered the state from Chhattisgarh a couple of years ago. It had been camera-trapped both in Palamu Tiger Reserve and Dalma wildlife sanctuary — to the north-west and south-east of Ranchi respectively — indicating exploratory movements.
Floaters headed east
- In January, a male tiger that had been photo-captured earlier in Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh and then Palamu Tiger Reserve, was rescued in Purulia, West Bengal, and taken back to Palamu.
- In March 2024, another male journeyed from Sanjay Dubri Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh to Odisha’s Bonai forest division south of Rourkela, passing through Palamu. Its long walk was recorded on camera-traps.
- Since 2021, officials have reported the movement of at least six tigers and one tigress in Palamu, which had lost all resident tigers over the preceding decade. The six males were either sighted or camera-trapped; the presence of the female was ascertained from lab analyses of droppings.
- In 2018, a floater male reached the Lalgarh forests of West Bengal’s Paschim Medinipur district. Villagers killed the tiger, which had possibly reached Lalgarh from Simlipal Tiger Reserve in Odisha through Jharkhand.
Given that many such long-distance movements go unrecorded, it is evident that a good number of big cats are moving eastward looking for space. While some are relatively localised movements within Odisha, Jharkhand, and West Bengal, the majority of floater males are coming out of the tiger-rich forests of Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra.
Many transit channels
The longer west-east cross-country corridor extends from Maharashtra’s Tadoba landscape via Gadchiroli to the Pench-Kanha landscape in Madhya Pradesh, and onward towards Odisha through Achanakmar Wildlife Sanctuary in Chhattisgarh. While the Tadoba-Kanha segment of the tiger corridor has good connectivity, the forest link becomes increasingly tenuous as the animals move further east.
The relatively shorter route passes from the Bandhavgarh landscape in eastern Madhya Pradesh to Palamu through a network of new tiger reserves such as Sanjay Dubri and Guru Ghasidas-Tamor Pingla. From Palamu, a route travels south, passing through the Palkot sanctuary near Gumla, towards the east-west elephant corridor across the Bandgaon forests.
In fact, the Bandgaon forests of West Singhbhum is a junction for multidirectional tiger movements. In the south, it connects with Simlipal Tiger Reserve in Odisha and the forests to the south of Rourkela.
Moving eastward from Bandgaon, tigers have two options to reach West Bengal — through the forests of Ayodhya Hills via Chandil in the Seraikela Kharsawan district of Jharkhand, or towards Bandwan (or Banduan) in Purulia district across Dalma Wildlife Sanctuary.
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Tigers walking out of Simlipal can also take the shorter route northward towards Dalma to enter West Bengal, like the tigress that had been brought from Tadoba in Maharashtra to improve the gene pool of Simlipal did last year.
Photographic evidence suggests that the male tiger rescued last week from Silli in Ranchi district was moving between Palamu and Dalma. It is possible that it was using the northern route from Palamu through the Chatra forests south of Hazaribagh to reach the Ayodhya Hills and Dalma.
From source to sink
In wildlife conservation, the source-sink theory applies to populations in a fragmented landscape. Typically, a good tiger forest breeds more tigers than it loses, creating a surplus — source population — over time. On the other hand, a sink population records more deaths than births, and would go extinct without regular immigration from source areas.
Once it comes of age, every male tiger must find — and make its own — a prey-rich forest patch with exclusive access to a female. In a tiger-rich forest, young males of a source population must wander far and wide in that pursuit.
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As male tigers move eastward from the Pench-Kanha and Bandhavgarh forest landscapes, the diminishing presence of wild prey and female tigers in degraded forests end up making these journeys very long — and often doomed.
While widespread hunting for bushmeat explains the absence of wild prey, nature is responsible for the gender imbalance in the floating populations. Unlike males, female tigers do not need to venture far from their natal areas, as they are usually tolerated by related females.
This is why the empty forests of the east are marked by the absence of tigresses, either floating or resident. And human-animal conflict always looms — fuelled by the dependence of floater males on livestock for food. The male tiger rescued last week was shuttling between Palamu and Dalma probably because it had not found anywhere to settle down.
Why tigers keep walking
The proverbial king of the forest, every tiger is genetically wired to go looking for its kingdom. It is natural that many individual tigers that move from source to sink populations do not survive, experts say. Perish or prosper, their resilience, and determination to break new ground, gives the species a good chance to colonise unlikely forests.
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Multiple turnaround stories from across India suggest that effective protection and management can help wild prey bases bounce back. But for forests that have already lost their resident tigresses, the only option perhaps is to fly in a few females from healthy source populations.
That is why a young tigress, Zeenat, was brought last year from Tadoba to Simlipal where the tiger population is facing a genetic bottleneck. Soon afterward, Zeenat, displaced from her natal forests and driven by her instinct to explore unfamiliar territories, began the long walk from Odisha to West Bengal.