Five Sanjay Gandhi National Park leopards to be radio-collared for study

Sanjay Gandhi National Park (SGNP) will put around a radio-collar on five wild leopards for a first-of-its-kind two-year-long study estimated to cost around Rs 60 lakh. The study will begin after SGNP signs a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), India.

The main objective of this study is to understand the usage of landscape by big cats in and around SGNP. The project will be headed by WCS wildlife biologist and leopard expert Dr Vidya Athreya along with forest officials from SGNP.

In 2009 a leopard from Ahmednagar division named Ajoba who was rescued from a well was collared by Athreya and after tracking its movement it was found that it had walked 125 km from Malshej Ghats to Mumbai, making it the only collared leopard to have ever been in Mumbai's landscape.

Calling it a positive move by forest department Athreya said that leopards because of their highly secretive nature are very hard to observe and camera trapping and collaring were the two tools that allows to obtain a greater understanding of this species.

"The collars will be fitted on five leopards from the park, which will help us track their movements thus providing us valuable insight into their daily lives including facts like how do they disperse out of the park, their eating habits, between what time do they move out," said Athreya adding that they had submitted a detailed proposal in 2015 itself following the intensive camera trapping exercise taken up by SGNP.

Explaining about the working of the radio collar she said that the collars work by sending a signal to a satellite which obtains the time and date the signal is sent from the collar and then this information is transmitted back to the researchers who can then go and investigate where the animal is and what it is doing.

Meanwhile Chief Conservator of Forest (CCF) and Director of SGNP Anwar Ahmed said that this work is also part of our mandate to have science based management of SGNP and hence we have been having continuous study on this apex predator. "We needed the radio collaring study not only for better conservation of leopards but also learn better ways to manage and mitigate the human-wildlife conflict," he said.

A 2017 study carried out by wildlife biologist Nikit Surve, from WCS- India who will be part of the radio collaring study too had shown that the leopard count in the wild had gone up to 41 and it also suggested that the big cats living in and around the park not only have been living in overlapping territories, but were also thriving due to abundant prey base available outside the park.