(BD) News from Wildlife Trust of Bangladesh

[Guest guest]

*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<http://www.wwf.de/fileadmin/fm-wwf/pdf_neu/loucks_etal_2010_climatic_change\

_sea_leve.pdf>

 

*Adam Barlow and Christina Greenwood

Wildlife Trust of Bangladesh

Dhaka*

*http://www.sundarbanstigerproject.info/*