The Power of Protection: Pench Tiger Reserve

Over the past two weeks we visited Pench and Kanha Tiger Reserves. In Pench we stayed at Karmajhiri Gate and met up with Aniruddha, a PhD from the Wildlife Institute of India. He’s been studying tiger ecology and dispersal for the past four years at Pench, using camera traps and scat analysis to estimate the population and evaluate movement around the park.

 

A sambar deer grazes in the forest.

 

Wild dogs play along the roadside by our jeep.

Pench is starkly different from Tadoba. Unlike Tadoba, where bamboo stands thick and evenly dispersed through the forest and the undergrowth is otherwise clear of vegetation, Pench has few bamboo clumps and thick lantana for tigers, deer and antelope to hide in. Space in the reserve is highly seasonal, with much of the land submerged by a dammed reservoir during the monsoon and winter months. During our visit the mating season was in full swing. The forest resounded with the echoing calls of meowing male peacocks, their tales rising and turning amongst the dry grasses, and asthmatic bellows of chital (spotted deer) parading around their sprawling racks.

 

Interviewing people in a large village near Pench Tiger Reserve.

While the drought of 2009 in Tadoba prevented interior villages from planting their one crop (rice, which requires standing water), Pench received enough scattered rain that the villagers could harvest one (maize) of their two crops (the second is wheat). We saw the difference in moisture most prominently in the animals. Tadoba gaur (bison) grazed near dried waterholes, their rear back bones concave and their ribs tight against their dark coats, while their equivalents in Pench roamed in shaded forest and drank from permanent natural pools in the Pench River. 

Stories from local villagers reinforced these differences and presented surprising new ones: Pench is remarkably conflict-free. Since the core of Pench is vacant of villages, we spoke with several villages in the buffer of the park, bordering on territorial (non-park) forest. No matter who we talked with – forest officials, researchers, local politicians, farmers – everyone shook their head at my inquiry into livestock depredation. Few to no livestock are killed by tigers and leopards in the 99 villages surrounding Pench, and no one can remember a case of the big cats injuring or killing a person. As expected, crop raiding and wolf attacks on goats and children were their main complaints, but I was stunned to learn that conflict with the top carnivores of the park is virtually nonexistent. Pench may well serve as a “control” site for comparison against parks with higher levels of conflict, such as Tadoba or even Kanha.

 

Although villagers outside Pench keep their cows beneath bamboo-thatched stalls at night, attacks on livestock by tigers are surprisingly rare.