A rare death took place deep inside Periyar Tiger Reserve last week. A 10-year-old adult tiger was found dead in a stream below a steep slope on the eastern side of the reserve that spreads over 777 square kilometres.
With the autopsy ruling out poaching, here is the conclusion that the forest department has drawn from the nature of the death. The tiger was hurled, gored or kicked to death by a prey, probably a bison or an elephant.
“If the leap is not correct during the hunt, there is a chance that the prey will counter attack,” said Dr Abdul Fatha, the veterinarian who did the autopsy. It is usual for tigers to strike with a deadly lunge.
“The ribs were fractured. So were the legs. These injuries could have been caused by the fall into the water from a huge height. The animal might have lost consciousness because it was unable to come out of the water. Its insides were bloated with water and silt,” Dr Fatha said.
Role reversal
The veterinarian said such incidents, of the predator falling victim to the prey, do occur inside the forest. However, the only other reported instance of a prey causing the death of a tiger was in 2015. This tiger was after a porcupine, a small prey when compared to the wild boar and gaur it normally hunts.
What ensued was not exactly a David-Goliath contest. The tiger made its deadly leap but the flight was a fraction short that its teeth could get hold of only a few sharp porcupine spines, which the giant cat, perhaps in its blinding hunger, gulped down. Internal bleeding killed the predator a few days later.
Shere Khan, the wise
The tiger is not the most efficient of hunters. Rudyard Kipling has told us how Shere Khan had waited and waited to lay his hands on Mowgli. The legendary tiger conservationist Valmik Thapar has said that a tiger's strike rate is just 10 per cent.
But the tiger is widely considered to be the wisest among predators. Unlike a lion or a cheetah, the tiger abandons the hunt the moment it realises that the hunt is not going its way. The tiger is so pragmatic that it targets only the young and the weak. This is why the death of a tiger during a hunt is widely considered an improbable event.
Disastrous makeover
But if such an unlikely death had taken place inside the PTR, it could have been the result of some profound changes that had taken place inside the forest. What if the August floods had altered the tiger's range, in other words its area of influence?
“Each tiger has its territory, and it preys on herds within this territory. Since there will be enough prey population within each range, a tiger is not known to intrude into other territories during its brief lifetime of 12-15 years,” said T V Sajeev, principal scientist at Kerala Forest Research Institute.
The floods, and the landslides it had triggered, might have caused a radical change in herd movement. “A tiger's prey population could have shifted to a territory completely alien to it. If this has happened, the tiger will have no choice but to move into a range where it would be totally lost. This tiger in alien territory will have no idea about prey density, its spread or even its behaviour. The topography, too, would be new,” Sajeev said.
If the tiger is unsure of its territory, it can fumble and make mistakes. “A tiger sure of its area would not have fallen off a slope the way the dead tiger in PTR had,” said Mathew S, an animal researcher based in Mumbai. “This looks like a tiger who had lost its way. In their home turf, a tiger is never a bumbling creature,” Mathews said.
A natural calamity can absolutely transform a known area. “A series of landslides, for instance, can thoroughly alter the topography of a tiger range leaving the beast utterly confused. Falling off newly-formed cliffs can then happen,” Mathew said.
Three deaths in five months
However, the PTR field director Georgi P Mathachan ruled out the flood theory. “Floods have not altered the forests in any big way. Only minor landslides have been reported inside the forest,” Mathachan said. This sounded a bit simplistic. The Geological Survey of India (GSI) reported over 1,000 landslides in forests falling under Palakkad division alone. The intensity of the floods were greater around the PTR. In fact, two tigers were reported dead in the PTR during the August floods.
This makes it three tiger deaths in PTR within five months. The 2016 tiger census had found that there were 29 tigers in PTR.
