OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT | ||
Guwahati, Jan. 16: A discovery of a black panther for the first time and the first ever photographic evidence of tiger has brought back Kaziranga-Karbi Anglong corridor in the spotlight. Camera traps laid by WWF India on the Kaziranga-Karbi Anglong corridor have found a black panther for the first time. “It has also got first photographic evidence of a tiger in the corridor,” a WWF official said. “On December 27, the camera got a picture of a melanistic common leopard (Panthera pardus), also known as black panther — the first time this mammal has been recorded in the checklist of mammals of Kaziranga and the first for Karbi Anglong district too. “More good news awaited the monitoring team as a new year surprise when they checked the cameras for the first time in 2012. The cameras had recorded a Royal Bengal tiger using this corridor. These records indicate the active use of the corridor,” Soumen Dey associate coordinator WWF-India, north bank landscape and Kaziranga-Karbi Anglong landscape programmes said. There are four such corridors in the Kaziranga-Karbi Anglong belt. These are Panbari, Haldibari, Kanchanjuri and Amguri. During floods these are vital links between the park and the higher grounds in Karbi Anglong. The migrating animals use these corridors to cross over to higher grounds across National Highway 37. Both big cats were found in the Kanchanjuri corridor. Ten camera traps were laid in this area. The tiger and the black panther were spotted by the camera at Ingzai village in Karbi Anglong. Camera traps were deployed in June 2010 to get photographic evidence of animal movement. By the end of 2011, a range of animals, mainly elephants, was found to be using the corridor. Other captured wildlife include wild boar, barking deer, jungle fowl and leopard. A WWF document says the Kaziranga-Karbi Anglong Landscape is a vital site situated within the Indo-Myanmar biodiversity hotspot. Geographically, the landscape primarily covers areas south of the Brahmaputra in Assam touching the neighbouring states of Meghalaya and Nagaland. WWF’s Kaziranga-Karbi Anglong conservation programme has been working since 2005 to document the corridors by initiating conservation activities involving communities around them. This is a challenging task given that these corridors, lying south of Kaziranga National Park, are densely inhabited with villages and many tourist resorts have sprouted in them of late. “The ongoing land use change to accommodate growing population and tourism pressure is slowly choking some of these corridors,” Dey said. =============================================================================================== |
Black panther caught on WWF camera
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment