How many tigers in kaziranga national park

No chance to back up, no hope of accelerating out of trouble on the rough track. Hazarika, in the passenger seat, couldn't even get off a shot before the earth-glazed female clobbered the jeep, which she far outweighed. His door caved in. I realized the rhino was shoving us toward the road's edge and butting our rig up onto two wheels, and I'd better get ready to jump before she rolled us.

Unlike African rhinos, Indian rhinos don't gore an enemy with the spike on their heads. They bite with large, sharp lower incisors.

The female's teeth were gouging deep grooves into the jeep's steel. Konwar had laid down a rule for Kaziranga—"No allowed for scared. At last the vehicle leveled out and skidded free. But she instantly gave chase, and it was still touch and go in a cloud of dust for several hundred feet.

Our destination was a site where the tracks of two tigers had been seen around a fresh rhino carcass. Tigers claim as many as 15 percent of the rhino calves in Kaziranga. This carcass spoke of tigers taking down an adult—a risky enterprise rarely reported. The most serious threat to rhinos still comes from predatory humans, just as it did a century ago. Which is why Kaziranga has nearly guards in the field, stationed between the unruly big animals and the poachers.

Squads operate out of camps, some built of concrete, the rest of logs and thatch, all standing on stilts. Guards mark the posts to show the levels of floods; some years, it's a post on the upper story. The men move in pairs or trios on foot and elephant-back—or by boat. Afternoon patrols finish after dark.

The guards wake to begin another sortie long before dawn, pausing first at a humble shrine to the goddess Kakoma to ask once again for safe passage. When the moon grows big, teams stay out all night. The mission never ceases. People caught taking fish from the river or bils have their nets confiscated and are subject to fines. Cattle and goats grazing inside the park have to be shooed home to village pastures.

More often, guards are called on to drive wildlife from the villages and fields back to Kaziranga. That's all routine work compared with dealing with armed men stalking rhinos. The animals' horns—made of agglutinated keratin fibers, the same substance as in hooves and hair—are prized for dagger handles in the Middle East and valued even more highly throughout Asia for their purported medicinal powers. From through , illegal hunters shot Kaziranga rhinos and several guards; guards killed 90 poachers and arrested The number of rhinos poached annually dropped below nine starting in —then in it rose to By the fifth week of , when I arrived, five more had been felled.

One was a calf, slaughtered for a tiny nub of horn. The wounded mother's horn was hacked off her face while she was still alive. It took her two days to die. But the park has another major problem—one nobody can suppress.

Kaziranga depends upon a much larger landscape to maintain its spectacular wildlife. It always has. Yet wherever the animals go these days, they encounter a rising flood of humankind.

You can get lost in the tallgrass right up to Kaziranga's southern edge, but just beyond you're among kids, dogs, chickens, milk goats, and miles of rice fields. A little farther on, you might reach a shed where a listless cow lies oozing fluids from the tiger wound on her neck, while Nijara Nath tells of discovering the cat at night in the cattle pen by the house. When crops begin to ripen, her husband, Indeswar, spends many nights at the edge of their field trying to scare away vegetarians, from dainty-hoofed deer to rhinos that pothole a paddy with every step.

The Naths don't resent the park—Indeswar's cousin makes good wages cooking at a tourist lodge—but they wish that the bureaucracy supposed to compensate folks for wildlife damage worked more efficiently. Development crowds even closer on the park's north side. From high in a lookout tower at a camp there, I could see only tame life—dairy herds of domestic buffalo and cattle—feeding across wetlands inside the park.

Since livestock grazed in this area before it was appended to the reserve in the s, authorities allow the practice to continue.

But the area as a whole experiences more elephant conflicts than almost any place in Assam, for it lies on a migratory route of herds following the last tatters of forest between Kaziranga and the Himalayan foothills to the north. Five small but absolutely vital habitat bridges were recently added to the park to ease the journey.

Along the way the animals confront National Highway 37, Assam's main east-west transportation route. Guards set up a slalom course of barriers to slow truck traffic at the most heavily used crossing sites. We tell your stories. Stories that inspire change. Login with Google. Login with Facebook. By signing up for yourstory you agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy of the platform.

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