The Indian Express (Delhi Edition)

Chital stock dwindling in Kuno

from the state’s prey-rich forests.

While Madhya Pradesh is in the process of bringing 1,500 chitals to replenish the dwindling stock at Kuno and looking to dispatch another lot to Gandhi Sagar, the project authoritie­s have acknowledg­ed the limitation­s of draining other habitats of prey without a strategy to reduce leopard predation. The Cheetah Project Steering Committee is considerin­g a proposal for introducin­g a larger cat in the Kuno mix to reduce leopard activities and ease the pressure on the prey base.

“A few larger cats can dominate the space now densely packed with leopards in Kuno and eventually impact their predation and breeding. If lions are not an option, a few tigers will have the same effect,” said a project scientist, adding that Cheetah Project Steering Committee chairperso­n Rajesh Gopal proposed the remedy at a recent meeting.

When contacted, Rajesh Gopal said that bringing tigers would be a biological approach aimed at fostering ecological niches. “Kuno has one of India’s highest density of leopards and they cannot be tossed around. Cheetahs and leopards co-exist with lions in Africa. In a landscape frequented by tigers, they are the natural choice in Kuno,” he said.

Over the last 15 years, four male tigers reached Kuno from Rajasthan’s Ranthambho­re tiger reserve. One of those tigers is believed to be still present in the larger Kuno landscape. The plan is to translocat­e a couple of females and expect males to show up on their own to establish a founder population in Kuno.

Larger cats, though, are not an option for Gandhi Sagar yet where the challenge at hand is to take leopards out of the prey enclosure. “Though easier said than done, we will divide the area and try to secure one compartmen­t at a time like we did in Kuno in 2022,” said a senior forest official.

A retired forest officer who served in Kuno, however, refused to buy the “leopard theory” behind the fall in chital numbers: “Look at the scale of the (chital) population slide. Are Kuno’s leopards selectivel­y preying on chitals? Or are we downplayin­g the impact of bushmeat poaching?”

A few state forest officials also questioned the consistenc­y of the estimation drives. Over the last two decades, project scientists reported per-sq-km chital density of 5 (2006), 36 (2011), 52 (2012) and 69 (2013) in Kuno. In 2021, they used two methods — camera trapping and distance sampling — to come up with two densities — 38 and 23 per sq km — of chitals.

Going by the lower density of 23 per sq km, the Cheetah Task Force estimated more than 8,000 chitals in Kuno wildlife sanctuary (345 sq km) in 2021. The state has released at least 750 chitals in Kuno since.

Within a year of introducin­g the first batch of cheetahs in September 2022, the number of chitals fell to an estimated 6,500 in Kuno. The downward trend, it is learnt, has not reversed since.