Summer 2023

Dear Friends:                                                                                                   

NEPAL

The good news out of Nepal last year was that its tiger numbers roared from 121 to 355 in the 2022 census which celebrated The Year of The Tiger. This substantial growth, a 190 percent increase in population size, is the result of Nepal's protection of tiger habitats and corridors, its collaboration with local communities and its strict enforcement of laws against poaching and illegal animal trade. Tigers were found well beyond the bounds of tiger reserves, which accounts, in part, for the alarming increase in tiger-human conflict. Between 2019 and 2022, 35 people were killed by wild tigers. This is not the result of tigers hunting people as in the old man-eating scenario, but a result of chance encounters in the danger zone of the community forests where tigers go in search of new habitat and villagers go to grow the occasional crop and collect fuel and fodder for their homes.

Aggressive efforts are now underway to mitigate these conflicts, especially at Bardia National Park.  Camera traps are being used to identify problem tigers. Old or injured tigers are either moved to the zoo or into forest enclosures. In the case of a healthy tiger, Community-Based Anti-Poaching Units (CBAPU), like our group at Dalla Post, are sent to villages to alert people to avoid certain areas and to the possibility of re-directing their reliance on forest products. To that end, fodder seedlings have been planted on private land, farmers have been encouraged to raise cash crops like ginger, turmeric, chamomile and lemon, and small homestay lodges have been built to generate tourist revenue. The National Trust for Nature Conservation estimates that over 8,000 villagers have been educated to this within the past year.

Nepal has become the international role model for community-based tiger conservation. It is absolutely critical that villages in close proximity to protected tiger reserves learn to live in harmony with a vibrant and healthy tiger population and know that they have the support of Park officials and local conservation experts lest they turn against wildlife conservation efforts. 

In 2009, with the vision of Dr. Bhim Gurung, The Fund for The Tiger began funding the Community Based Anti-Poaching Unit (CBAPU) at Dalla in the southwestern corner of Nepal’s Bardia National Park.  Our facility is at the edge of the Khatta corridor, a network of 74 community forests covering 202 sq km, providing safe passage for tigers between Bardia National Park in Nepal and Katarniaghat Wildlife Sanctuary in India. Over the last 5 years, 46 individual tigers have been detected using the corridor with other iconic and threatened mammal species, including the Asian elephant and the greater one-horned rhino. At our Dalla Post, a total of 256 youths from 3 villages have been mobilized to conduct regular anti-poaching operations in the buffer zone of Bardia National Park and the Khatta corridor. There have been no poaching reports of tigers, elephants, or rhinos in the CBAPU working area, and the movement of the tiger has drastically increased in the corridor’s forests. Bhim travelled to Nepal in May to meet with officials at Bardia and wrote that “they were very impressed with the outcome of the project and The Fund for The Tiger support for so many years. The CBAPU project site at Dalla has become a role model where many other organizations come and observe how they operate.”

Based on the success of the CBAPU at Dalla Post, Bardia, we have consolidated our efforts at Chitwan National Park in Nepal and, in 2018, initiated a CBAPU at Meghauli village. Dr. Bhim Gurung coordinates this program through the Nepal Tiger Trust. There are now 118 members conducting regular patrolling with the Nepal Army and Chitwan National Park rangers. Like at Bardia, the CBAPU is involved in communicating with local villagers to mitigate human wildlife conflict issues. In June our team was able to work with our camera trapping team to identify the culprit of a livestock predation incident as a leopard, not a tiger, then work with the Forest Department to get proper compensation for the villagers.

We continue to support the Long-Term Tiger Monitoring Project started by Chuck McDougal in the 1970’s.  We are pleased to lend our support to lead tiger tracker, Baburam Mahato, a crucial ally in the Forest Department’s efforts to protect all endangered wildlife. He is one of the first to be called to the scene to investigate incidents of wildlife deaths or human-tiger conflict.  Bhim visited with this tiger tracking team in May and sent an interesting series of photos. In one picture he is standing amidst a clump of trees demonstrating how to use the new camera sets. Another picture, taken a few days later with the new cameras,  records a tiger walking through the same clump of tress. Timing is everything.

INDIA 

It is with great pleasure that, since 1996, The Fund for The Tiger has been able to partner with, and support, various hard-hitting and effective programs of The Wildlife Protection Society of India  [WPSI] under the dynamic leadership of Belinda Wright. The Investigation into Poaching and Trade of Wild Tigers, its signature campaign, has clearly been paying off.  Since January of this year, Nitin Desai, the WPSI Director of Central India operations and Advocate Manjula Srivastava have held 13 training sessions for nearly 1,000 Forest Department personnel; achieved convictions in seven important wildlife court cases resulting in 11 poachers being fined and sentenced to prison. Nitin and another WPSI colleague are deeply involved in a tiger poaching and seizure case: two tiger skins and two tiger skeletons were seized and nine suspected criminals arrested. This is an ongoing investigation and a Red Alert has been issued across several tiger reserves in India.

The WPSI’s Tiger Conservation Awareness program, codenamed Operation Bondomobile after its founding benefactor, David Bonderman, was launched in 2011 to create anti-poaching tiger conservation awareness in the fringe villages of Kanha and Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserves.  In the first 6 months of 2023, the Bondomobile van has reached 1,057 villages and 411 weekly markets, engaging with 61,076 people and distributing cards about the Secret Information Reward Scheme. 28 calls resulted in the arrest of 24 poachers in 6 wildlife crime cases across Central India.

Since 2001, we have supported a WPSI Field Officer operating in and around Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve. He runs the Bondomobile effort, conducts wildlife crime education workshops with students and young forest officers and is a liason with the Forest Department when a crisis emerges.  He has also become a major partner in Nitin Desai’s aggressive Poaching and Trade operations across Central India. Since January, WPSI’s Field Officer at Bandhavgarh has conducted seven wildlife education workshops for over 700 students and assisted the Forest Department investigating the deaths of 8 tigers and 3 leopards in the greater Bandhavgarh area. Of the 8 recent tiger deaths, 4 were from infighting among young tigers seeking to establish their own territory, 2 from electrocutions by illegal fencing set up by villagers to protect their farmland, and two deaths of undetermined cause. This a bittersweet consequence of a tiger population that has reached maximum capacity.

The WPSI’s continued presence in this region serves as an important and proven deterrent to local wildlife criminals and poaching groups and has fostered regional wildlife guardians among local communities.

In March 2023 we received this excellent summary report from The Wildlife Protection Society of India…

“India’s population of about 3,000 wild tigers faces a myriad of threats ranging from human-wildlife conflict, retaliatory poisoning and road and train accidents, to electrocution, indiscriminate poaching and, not least of all, the illegal trade in tiger parts. Local poaching, which is rampant in most of the country, does effect tigers although the focus is largely on their prey species, thereby impacting prey densities that are vital for tiger survival. Moreover, nearly every critical tiger habitat in India is plagued with environmental crimes, such as uncontrolled and illegal sand mining and timber removal, which has resulted in habitat fragmentation, severely disturbed habitats and increased biotic pressures for natural resources.  India’s Protected Area Network, which now includes 53 Tiger Reserves, covers nearly 5.28% of the country’s total geographical area. The Network is dotted by an estimated 170,000 thousand villages located in fringe areas of the forests. These regions are home to an estimated 275 million people, a significant proportion of whom are marginalized tribal communities who depend on forests for part, or all, of their sustenance and livelihoods. Given their proximity to the forests, these fringe-villages also experience an excessively high amount of negative human-wildlife interactions and are frequently the setting for wildlife crimes such as poaching for bushmeat, wildlife electrocutions and opportunistic trade in wildlife and their derivatives. But despite the odds, India’s resilient tiger population continues to endure.”

            Our partners in India and Nepal, home to over 75% of the world’s remaining wild tigers, are clearly making a difference, working at ground zero, boots on the ground, to preserve and protect the wild tiger and its habitat. We are helping the right people in the right places!!        

BANDHAVGARH

Since 1994 I have led 24 tiger conservation trips to Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve in Central India. Many of you reading this letter travelled with me on that tip. This is for you. I sent an email to my good friend, guide, and naturalist, Jagat Chaturvedi, in mid-June asking him about the status of the tiger there. His reply burst with passion and love for that beautiful place.    He listed the names of 16 adult tigers with 23 cubs and sub-adults, all just in the 3 main core areas of Tala, Magdhi and Khitouli. And some with familiar lineage connections to past tigers that I remember well- Sita, Charger, Chakhadara, B-2, Bamera, and Chorebera, to name a few. Tigers are flourishing at Bandhavgarh. The Forest Department estimates about 150 tigers in the greater Bandhavgarh landscape. And the wild elephant populations continue to roam in the southern zones. Excerpts from Jagat in his own words:

“Bandhavgarh amazes every season, every day and on every game ride. It's like floating ship in the ocean under which millions of life exists, As one goes down other appear on surface. As it's about to sun set of the holi season for wildlife destinations for three months during monsoon there are major changes like Tala has gone beyond imagination as it was used to happen in magadhi and dhamokhar.  During winter months it's for better than any other zones of the park where one would say slow and study wins the race. Not only sightings but number 9 to 11 different tiger in one go. Keeping finger crossed and hoping for the best to next season and also to mighty legends.  Jai Bagh” 

The Fund for The Tiger was incorporated in the State of California as a non-profit public charity in August, 1995.  I am extremely pleased to be able to say that as of June 30, 2023 we have been able to give $1,454,556 to help tiger conservation work in India and Nepal. To those of you who have contributed to this, our heartfelt THANK YOU!

A special thank you to the American Himalayan Foundation, Mountain Travel Sobek, David Bonderman, World Charity Foundation, The McDougal Foundation, Meriama Fund, Bill and Meredith Bishop, and Delanie Read for their generous support over the years.

JAIBAGH- the email address of The Fund for The Tiger, means “long live the tiger” in the Nepali language. Please check out our new website with expanded essays and photographs at: www.thefundforthetiger.org.

Sincerely,

Brian K. Weirum
Chairman
The Fund for The Tiger