Bhopal: After successfully translocating a six-year-old tigress from Kanha National Park to Panna Tiger Reserve, the park management at Panna released the striped animal in the wild on Sunday.
"We have released the tigress brought from Kanha successfully in the wild this morning and are closely monitoring its movements through the signals being emitted by the radio-collar fitted on the feline," Panna Tiger Reserve Director, R S Murthy told PTI from Panna which is nearly 400 km away from the state capital.
Besides the local staff and veterinarians, the movements of the just released tigress are being watched by the experts form the Wildlife Institute of India (WII), he said.
"Initially, we will keep a close watch on the tigress for one week and the animal normally will take three months to settle comfortably in new surroundings," Murthy said.
He also said that the other important issue is that the animal must start making a kill on its own to survive in the jungles.
The six-year-old tigress is among the three cubs that survived after their mother died fighting a tiger. These cubswere later housed in a special enclosure in Mukki range in Kanha to prevent them from becoming preys for other animals.
Among the three, the male cub was shifted to Bhopal-based Van Vihar National Park about three years back while the remaining two were helped in developing natural instincts of killing preys in their enclosure after being trained by zoo officials.
One of them was shifted about eight months back to Panna in similar fashion and since then she has survived successfully in the jungles, the park sources said.
This was for the first time that tigresses in an orphanage have learnt to kill preys on their own following an experiment carried out by Kanha National Park officials probably for the first time in the world.
Panna Tiger Reserve which had lost its entire tiger population allegedly due to poaching has now 10 tigers in its ranges including a male, four females (including the one released today) and six cubs.
PTI
